Make it a Movie: ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King

In our Make it a Movie section we play the role of movie producers and map out the movie production. ‘Salem’s Lot is a 1975 Stephen King classic that has already seen multiple tv adaptations in 1979 as well as in 2004 (which starred Rob Lowe).  The book follows Ben Mears as he ventures back to where he spent his summers as a child: Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine (aka ‘Salem’s Lot). Things quickly become amiss as unexplained disappearances and deaths start to pop up throughout the small town.

If you read the book then you’re quite aware that vampires are roaming around at night. However, the towns people are unaware of this fact (and as a reader 14 hours into an audiobook this becomes quite frustrating). Nonetheless, there are a lot of interesting characters and scenes in this classic vampire story to squeeze out a good horror film. We covered all of this on our podcast about the book if you’re interested. For the movie we would make it much more mystery focused and darker (think the movie Se7en), which I think would amplify the overall horror aspects and empathy for the main characters. 

Production Notes: As mentioned above there already has been a few tv adaptations, but a new version is coming to the big screen on April 21st, 2023. It’s already been filmed and the cast is set in stone, but we’ll just cover who they casted and who we were thinking would play the roles. 

Based on: ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King

Genre: Horror/Mystery

Logline: Dracula + Se7en

Proposed Casting for ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King

Ben Mears (Upcoming Movie: Lewis Pullman) – Ben comes to ‘Salem’s Lot to write a new book, but ends up instead taking the role of vampire slayer. Ben is a smart confident guy, in the movie he’ll likely need to drive the narrative a bit more and be the true lead character. He does have some swagger about him, I mean he picks up his love interest, Susan Norton, by basically saying ‘oh you’re reading my book’. Which is what I’m going to start doing when I see all our fans out their reading our blogs. Anyway… In the movie he’ll likely take on a more central role in this mystery. A guy like Denzel Washington would be perfect for the role, unfortunately he’s a bit too old, fortunately he has a son who has already shown the ability to be a legit leading man and great actor. So we’ll take John David Washington to lead this movie.

Richard Straker (Upcoming Movie: Pilou Asbæk) – Barlow’s right hand man or human thrall. ‘Salem’s Lot isn’t able to be taken over by vampires without Straker setting everything in motion and ultimately shedding the first blood with Ralphie Glick. He is described as tall, skinny, and worldly. The person that came to my mind instantly was Mark Strong (1917 & The Kingsman). He’s got an evil look about him and the British accent will play perfectly.

Kurt Barlow (Upcoming Movie: William Sadler) – The head vampire that pretty much destroys the town. He isn’t heard from too much throughout the book, that would change in the film as he would likely be a key piece to the movie. I was thinking someone like Gary Oldman would make a great vampire, not knowing that he actually has already played count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But hey, why not run it back? That film was in 1992 anyway and he’s only acted in a mere 88 productions since then. We already casted him as a bad guy in Blacktop Wasteland, I guess we’ve just forgotten him as the honorable Commissioner Gordon.

Father Callahan (Upcoming Movie: John Benjamin Hickey) – The only way to really defeat vampires is using crosses and other Christian tactics, so Father Callahan seems like he’d be a pretty important character. In the book he mysteriously runs away right before the climax, which had has scratching our heads a bit. But a grumpy, Irish, alcoholic priest, seems like the perfect casting for Gene Hackman. Yeah he may be a bit old, he may have retired from acting in 2004, but I’d love to see him on the big screen again at least one more time.

Fun Fact: Spencer Treat Clark is playing the role of Mike Ryerson in the upcoming Movie, do you recognize that face and those blue eyes?

… That’s because it’s the boy from Gladiator! 

There are an insane amount of other characters from the book that we could cast here but for now we’ll stick with these. Let us know what we got wrong and who we’re missing!

Check out our Episode on ‘Salem’s Lot or our Book Club Questions. You can also check out other book’s we’ve casted at our Make it a Movie page.