Warner Bros. and New Line's re-adaptation of Stephen King's Salem's Lot is coming to the Max streaming service next month just in time for Halloween, but fans of the novel may want to prepare themselves for sound like some significant changes to the original story - particularly the ending.
In EW's recent coverage of the new movie, they reveal that the final showdown between Ben Mears and his allies and ancient vampire Kurt Barlow and his undead servants will play out differently than it does on the page.
Here's an excerpt from the article.
"This Salem's Lot also feels, in some ways, like an action movie to both stars. The final sequence, in particular, is a climactic event that plays out at a drive-in movie theater. It's not how King's novel ends, but the scene allowed Pullman and Leigh learn stunts.
'My body was broken after,' Pullman remarks. 'I really, really enjoyed throwing my body around and learning from our stunt doubles how the whole process works,' Leigh says. 'I had no trial by fire in terms of...' She laughs because, again, she's making puns."
At the end of the novel, Ben Mears and Mark Petrie are the only survivors after destroying Barlow in the Marsten House and driving away as a fire consumes the town. Though Leigh's character, Susan Norton, does return as a vampire in the divisive epilogue, she had been "killed-off" prior to these events.
Alterations to King's source material are commonplace in big and small screen adaptation, so we can't see fans kicking up too much of a fuss over this - though it's difficult to tell just how big a departure the ending will be without some more context.
"Salem's Lot is such a special book because there's a lot of macro sociopolitical themes in there. It's not just a horror book," Pullman says of this latest take on the story. "How Gary approached it was almost like, this is not a horror movie. This is a movie about a small town in America where something horrific happens. He was trying to also rekindle the fire of mystique about vampires. They've shifted in many different ways over the last couple of decades in terms of pop culture. I think Gary really wanted to return back to this very mysterious, almost mythological lens on them."
Last year, we got word that Warner Bros. had pushed Salem's Lot back to April 21, 2023 after previously planning to release it on September 9, 2022 Since then, the movie appeared to be removed from the schedule altogether, and there were concerns that it may be shelved following David Zaslav's decision to write off the Batgirl movie.
Then, back in March, New Line confirmed the rumor that the vampire horror film will skip theaters altogether and debut on the Max streaming service. Previous trade reports have noted that this "is not a reflection of the film’s quality, but is due to the fact that the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike has created a growing need for Max content."
The movie also stars Bill Camp and Spencer Treat Clark. Recent IT adaptation writer Gary Dauberman (Annabelle Comes Home) directs, and also penned the screenplay.
King's novel tells the story of a writer named Ben Mears who returns to his childhood town of Jerusalem's Lot, only to find himself drawn to an old house that traumatized him as a child. The Marsten House is an evil place, and an evil place attracts evil men. Unfortunately for Ben and the rest of the town, this time the evil men in question are powerful vampire Kurt Barlow and his devious familiar Richard Straker.
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