Salem’s Lot director wanted to give Stephen King the Conjuring treatment

Killer clowns, killer dolls, killer nuns: filmmaker Gary Dauberman is no stranger to horror beasts. But after writing and directing two It films Annabelle comes homehe was ready for change. But not a big one: he really wanted to reverse Stephen King’s famous vampire book ‘Salem’s Lot to a blood-sucking good time at the movies.

Published in 1975, ‘Salem’s Lot was King’s second novel, and it’s full of the elements that came to define his work: a small-town Maine setting, a sprawling cast of imperfect townspeople, and a supernatural threat that engulfs their normal lives in darkness. The story of writer Ben Mears who returned to his hometown to investigate an old murder house, only to encounter a rising vampiric overlord, was adapted into a legendary TV miniseries in 1979. For Dauberman, the book and its small-screen adaptation were essential in shaping his love of horror, which only raised the stakes (ahem) when there is a chance to sink his own fangs (ahem ahem) in King’s work was discussed at Warner Bros. Pictures.

Dauberman assembled a great cast for Salem’s fateincluding Pilou Asbæk, Bill Camp, Alfre Woodard and Lewis Pullman (soon to be seen in Marvel’s Lightning strikes*), but the hard work of slimming down one of King’s longer books was still a challenge. Ahead of the October 3 premiere of the film about Max, Polygon spoke with the writer-director about tackling the material and going back to basics to make vampires cool again.

Polygon: Was the idea of ​​adaptation ‘Salem’s Lot born from the success of It? Was the hope for a spiritual continuation?

Gary Dauberman: Discussions about adapting King’s material have taken place before It. I’m a big fan, and growing up it was always… This would make such a great movie. This would be such a great TV show. Of course, with the success of Iteveryone suddenly wanted to adapt Stephen King, and rightly so. But in the meantime, this project has been going on for years and years and years. Stay with me is one of my favorite movies of all time – Wrong — these are real classics — The radiant – that come from Stephen’s mind. And so I knew because of it It what they were entitled to ‘Salem’s Lot. It was, I think, going to be a TV series at the time. And I brought up the conversation about making a movie, and it grew from there.

When I was a kid, the miniseries – Georgie in the Sewer (in the It miniseries), that was very important to me to see as a child. And Danny taps on the window in the (Salem’s Lot) miniseries from ’79, that had a huge influence on me. So I thought, Man, I’d love to see that again, rewatch it. And it’s been so influential on so many of the things that have happened since that I don’t think people realize how influential that book is.

What possibilities did you see in adapting? ‘Salem’s Lot right now, in terms of making it fresh or relevant?

I was looking at it from: I hadn’t seen a really great vampire movie in a while, and I was thinking about how James Wan shot it The Magic – there had been a hundred haunted house movies before the first one Magic came out, but it took a classic genre and told it in a refreshing way, with really classic tropes. Which we hadn’t seen in a while, because everyone is trying to think: How can we do it differently? I really wanted to approach vampires (in the) classic style, instead of saying: Okay, how can I undermine it somehow? Because I feel like we’ve seen that and I haven’t seen a classic vampire movie in a long time.

I started thinking about the vampire movies I love that might not really match up ‘Salem’s Lot. The lost boys is one of my favorite horror films of all time. So there are many Lost boys here. That kind of stuff started to seep in, which I think is okay, because Stephen King is pop culture. So I just started drawing from different sources that I loved, and I felt like I had a license to do that because King has that reach on pop culture, that hold.

‘Salem’s fate is quite an extensive book. How did you crack the edit into a tighter feature? What was the challenge?

It was the same challenge I have with a lot of material. If it’s a book, there’s so much good material that it’s about narrowing it down. There are so many stories I wish I could have just told. That’s probably why it was more of a series. It could have been a matter of eight hours. It would be a damn cool eight hours, but… what you do is basically boil it down to the core elements, that core group. That’s a challenge. They say ‘kill your darlings’, but these are my darlings because I love them, not because I wrote them. The biggest hurdles I had to overcome were: What can I lose and still keep in the spirit of the book and the story?

Given all the trimming you had to do to move on this clip, what did you ultimately figure out to make sure the film still feels cohesive?

The biggest thing I had to invent – ​​and I’m not saying it’s better, I’m just saying I had to invent it for the movie – but there’s a part of the book where (characters) go from house to house killing vampires. And I had written that first, but it became long and quite episodic. So the biggest challenge was: how could I (…) have them compete in one place, instead of going from house to house? And I thought about community and where people come together, and I turned that into a set piece. But I also like the metaphor of what that set piece is saying. I really like that series, but it’s just different from the book.

If you write and direct, I imagine coming up with cool stuff is a bit of a “chicken and egg” process, where you imagine your directing approach and write from it, or write in a vacuum and direct the script. Given that the film has some splashy, gory moments, were there any scenes where your director’s brain drove the writer’s brain?

One of the things I thought about a lot was the cross. Usually you raise a cross and then the vampire snarls and goes back. I was like, Okay, we’ve seen that. I wanted to make it different and really make us feel the power of belief and the power of faith and what the vampire feels when they are confronted with this power. So I started thinking about it being a forceso it’s like they could feel it. They’re pushed back, they’re blown back a little bit. The more you believe, the more powerful it is.

The glowing crucifixes, which essentially become vampire kryptonite, really shine in the film. That made me wonder: Is every vampire movie a faith-based movie on some level?

I think because the roots of vampires go back thousands of years, it’s hard not to make everything feel like it comes from religion. But yeah, I mean, it’s in the lore itself: stakes through the heart, crucifixes, garlic, these are the tools you use to wipe out vampires. And the power of faith. And I think this is exemplified by a character, Father Callahan in the film, who has lost his faith, and confronting these undead things, these unholy things, really helps him get it back. Religion plays a major role in this, but it plays a bit in the background.

What did you learn from? It who helped you further Salem’s fate? And did you ever think that this would be a real continuation? As in, true to so much of King’s work, this could happen in the It cinematic universe?

I think without a doubt these exist in the same world, in the same universe. I mean, they do that in the book. It’s one of the things I like about his work: he’s a man who has created a universe without announcing that he is creating this universe. It’s just these little Easter eggs for the people who have read his other books. Do you get it? If you did, that’s cool. It gives you a little laugh. I have Christine, the actual (evil car from King’s novel Christine), in the mechanic’s workshop in town. I have a lot of things like that. I dropped Easter eggs around town – the production designers had a lot of fun thinking about that kind of thing. Everything is connected.

Does this mean the Dark Tower is out there somewhere too?