Making Vampires Scary Again
As for the vampires themselves, as more townspeople are turned into bloodsuckers with each passing day, Dauberman wanted to move firmly away from the sexually charged “hot vampires” of recent years seen in films and series like Twilight or Interview with the Vampire.
“I kind of wanted to take a classic approach because I hadn’t seen a classic approach in a while,” he says. “I thought about the way that James [Wan] approached The Conjuring where it felt like a very classically told haunted house story, but it felt fresh at the time because we hadn’t seen that in a long time. That was my approach to vampires here. It’s what the book is. It’s Dracula set in small town America. I wanted to be true to that spirit.”
When it came to Barlow, the ancient vampire that sets the fall of Jerusalem’s Lot in motion, the European nobleman of King’s novel was transformed into a Nosferatu-like creature for the 1979 adaptation, before the late Rutger Hauer walked the character back toward the King interpretation for the 2004 miniseries. Although Dauberman says he initially took more of the latter approach, presenting Barlow closer to what he was in the book, that “ate up a lot of real estate,” as he describes it.
“I kept going back to the ’79 version,” Dauberman says about his eventual solution. “I have a Barlow action figure from the ’79 version and I kept going back to that. I had long talks with James [Wan] about that, the creature version vs. the Dracula-esque version of Barlow. We started to explore some designs and got excited about the designs and stuff, so I sort of just naturally gave myself over to the more creature-like version of Barlow than the European nobleman side.”
Why We Keep Returning to Salem’s Lot
Filmed in 2021 and early 2022, and initially slated to hit theaters in fall of 2022, Dauberman’s film fell prey to the corporate reorganization that sent other Warner Bros. productions like Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme into oblivion as tax writeoffs. Fortunately, Salem’s Lot has not been banished from sight, even though its theatrical run was canceled in favor of a premiere on the Max streaming service. “It was a long journey,” Dauberman tells Den of Geek about the film’s protracted road to release. “It was a dark journey, you know, mostly an unpleasant journey, just not knowing… I just didn’t know what was going on.”
One person who did provide encouragement to Dauberman during both the filming of Salem’s Lot and its lengthy period in limbo was Stephen King himself. While the legendary author gave Dauberman notes on the script and, later, a cut of the film, he also publicly admonished Warner Bros. Discovery for holding up the release of the completed film while privately supporting its writer-director.