Salem’s Lot Doesn’t Skip Over the Book’s Most Important Stephen King Easter Egg

This text incorporates spoilers for Salem’s Lot (2024), and gentle spoilers for Stephen King’s The Darkish Tower novels.

In adapting Stephen King’s second e-book as a movie for the primary time (it’s been made twice as a miniseries), Salem’s Lot leaves a whole lot of the novel’s coronary heart on the web page and chooses to focus totally on middling vampire scares. As a Fixed Reader for many of my life, the various missed alternatives Salem’s Lot waves at because it cruises by way of its overstuffed closing act are disappointing, nevertheless it may have been worse. You’ll be able to try my full evaluate of the film out yonder approach, as a result of from right here on out, I’m taking the critic hat off and letting my King freak flag fly.

“Unhappy to see a person’s religion fail.”

Because the townspeople of Salem’s Lot change into conscious of the encroaching vampire risk, they enlist a theological heavy to hook them up with some holy water, crosses, and non secular steering. That heavy is Father Donald Callahan, performed right here by John Benjamin Hickey. Callahan is an alcoholic priest who clings to what the church as soon as meant to him, and his struggles to keep up that religion within the face of the evil on his doorstep give him about as a lot depth as another character on this adaptation (sadly, that’s not a lot). That religion will get put to the check in a serious approach late within the movie and, despite the fact that Salem’s Lot director Gary Dauberman’s off to the races at that time and doesn’t dwell on what’s a key scene from the e-book, he does take the briefest of moments to incorporate one essential element associated to Father Callahan that King followers know, merely put, you simply can’t f*** with. Not whereas the Tower nonetheless stands.

Father Callahan’s confrontation with the vampire Barlow is likely one of the highest moments of the e-book, a closing check of the priest’s failing religion. Barlow has younger Mark Petrie trapped, however he’s backed right into a nook by Callahan and his crucifix. Barlow presents to drop the boy if Callahan will drop his cross, so that every can weigh the energy of their religion in opposition to the opposite, with Barlow fairly assured that his darkish powers will win the day. The waning energy of Callahan’s religion is central to the character’s arc, however till this level, that battle had been a completely inside one till it turns into embodied by Barlow’s problem.

The vampire drops the boy, however Callahan doesn’t belief his religion sufficient to decrease his crucifix. It’s in that second of hesitation that the holy relic turns into a bunch of crap wooden. Barlow descends on Callahan and, somewhat than kill him, topics him to a destiny worse than dying: he forces Callahan to drink his blood, which leaves him alive not fairly as a vampire, however supernaturally marked for different vampires and completely reduce off from any holy energy that had been defending him earlier than.

Dauberman’s adaptation omits that final half, and by the point the characters return to this location, Callahan seems to be useless on the bottom. A dead-end for a personality the film largely treats as a dead-end himself. Salem’s Lot performs quick and unfastened with the large moments of King’s novel, and I begrudge no adaptation truncating occasions to maintain issues shifting, however I’ll admit this finish for Callahan pulled an audibly upset response from me.

The Priest’s Story

There’s a Stephen King adaptation on the horizon that feels virtually taboo to say, for concern that getting too excited for it might result in some coincidence (or, Ka) that derails the venture. That adaptation is Mike Flanagan’s deliberate Darkish Tower TV collection. I don’t need to spoil the character of King’s genre-bending, seven-novel opus, however what I’ll say is that there’s a heavy quantity of self-reflexivity baked into that story the place components of many Stephen King tales come into play. Father Callahan’s life after being marked by Barlow, what occurs to him after he leaves Salem’s Lot in shame, turns into an necessary a part of the Darkish Tower narrative because it winds its approach towards its conclusion. If we’re going to weld an MCU glossary time period onto all this, Father Callahan being pressured to drink Barlow’s blood is as near a “nexus occasion,” a hard and fast time limit, as there may be from King’s non-Tower novels, which is why seeing Callahan look like useless on the bottom despatched my King-loving ass by way of the roof.

I slept on it, and that’s when two minor particulars that Dauberman seeded in his staging of that scene got here into focus. Early within the movie, trainer Matt Burke (Invoice Camp) mentions a idea that vampirism spreads by way of completely different individuals at completely different charges. So, for some, they don’t get up a vampire instantly, and that’s necessary to recollect when Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) and firm discover Father Callahan on the Petrie home. He’s useless… however possibly solely largely useless. And as our knowledge from Miracle Max tells us, “there is a large distinction between largely useless and all useless. Principally useless is barely alive.”

The second element is an extremely transient shot, however little question an intentional one: Callahan’s face is smeared with blood (the implication being he drank some Barlow blood!). Dauberman is not any King novice (he co-wrote the IT motion pictures), nor does he completely draw back from the extra “on the market” points of the creator’s work: give IT’s “Ritual of Chüd” a Google after which give the person credit score the place it’s due for locating a approach to get that onscreen in a blockbuster horror film. So Dauberman does account for that crucial story level, however at that time, the film’s so targeted on going from vampire encounter to vampire encounter that they don’t have time to delve into the priest’s melancholic exile from the world of the dwelling.

That’s to not essentially say that Mike Flanagan (Physician Sleep, Gerald’s Recreation) had any type of hand in any of this – Salem’s Lot was within the can earlier than the announcement that Flanagan had gotten The Darkish Tower rights. The shot of Callahan’s bloody mouth is moreso a collegial recognition on Dauberman’s half that representing the true nature of Callahan’s encounter with Barlow is one thing of a accountability of his. Whether or not the backroom dealings that may be essential to port this particular iteration of the character are even doable stays to be seen (Hickey’s good within the position regardless of the character being underserved).

Salem’s Lot is a Warner Bros. manufacturing, and although Flanagan hasn’t but introduced the place his Darkish Tower adaptation will likely be produced, the sensible cash appears to be on Amazon, the place he lately arrange a brand new general deal. Importantly although, that deal features a carveout for The Darkish Tower: Flanagan could make that one with whichever companions he needs. Flanagan has been adamant that his Darkish Tower adaptation will likely be a fairly literal adaptation of the books, so whereas swapping a distinct character in for Father Callahan wouldn’t be out of the query, it appears unlikely primarily based on his mission assertion for the present, to not point out the truth that watching his Netflix collection Midnight Mass will inform you he clearly loves Salem’s Lot… so much. Flanagan’s adaptation of Physician Sleep, and the best way it reconciles King’s Shining novel with the Kubrick film and respects that every has a discrete place in popular culture, looks as if a sign that the filmmaker is open to leaning on imagery from earlier King movie and TV variations – like Dauberman’s Salem’s Lot – to bridge any data gaps for the viewers.

Ka Is a Wheel

It ought to be famous that even Sony’s disastrous 2017 try to adapt The Darkish Tower understood that this cross-pollination of King iconography was crucial to bringing the story of Roland Deschain to life. Nevertheless, the style by which these references are dealt with illuminates a serious motive that preliminary effort failed as spectacularly because it did. King’s Darkish Tower novels blossom with metaphysical weirdness as they go, however they start with the comparatively easy The Gunslinger, which favors introducing central characters Roland, Jake Chamberlain, and the Man in Black. King saves many of the labyrinthine geopolitics of Mid-world and the multiversal self-referentiality for later within the story, so by the point the characters are wandering by way of the aftermath of the Captain Journeys virus from The Stand, or enlisting assist from Insomnia’s Patrick Danville, it feels natural to the plot.

The Darkish Tower novels – and even the Darkish Tower itself – are a celebration of storytelling, so when all The Darkish Tower film contains to characterize that theme are fast pictures of a “Pennywise” carnival signal or a framed photograph of The Shining’s Overlook Resort, with no care given as to why they’re showing in any respect, that shoddy world-building isn’t only a missed alternative, it goes in opposition to the story being informed in a really particular and damaging approach. In actual fact, one of the vital critiques of Nikolaj Arcel’s Darkish Tower film was the way it eschewed the gradual construct of the Darkish Tower narrative by pulling threads from later booksk ahead in a approach that undercut their emotional weight, presumably so the film may have extra motion scenes.

There’s no query that Mike Flanagan’s imaginative and prescient of The Darkish Tower will account for this nuance, one thing made very clear by an trade between Danny Torrance and the ghost of Dick Hallorann in Physician Sleep. The Shining sequel examines the impact Danny’s traumatic expertise on the Overlook had on him as an grownup, and the way the previous manifests within the current is likely one of the movie’s main focuses. Danny is reluctant to assist a younger lady who’s on the mercy of forces not dissimilar to these on the Overlook, and Dick’s spirit reinforces the karmic want for Danny to pay ahead the sacrifice Dick made for Danny by saying “all of it comes round. Ka is a wheel.” Dick’s level is obvious to Danny, with no need to know what Ka is. However for these of us within the viewers who do know one thing about The Darkish Tower’s pervading lifeforce, that transient statement of Dick’s symbolizes an understanding of how you can deploy a Stephen King reference in a approach that feels each weighty and thematically related.

We’ll must get a little bit additional down the trail to search out out if Flanagan intends to fold John Benjamin Hickey’s Father Callahan into his Darkish Tower adaptation, but when the character does issue into the plot like he does within the books, that very transient shot of Callahan’s mouth lined in vampire blood could have laid a whole lot of groundwork proper underneath the noses of King followers who solely go so far as watching the variations with out making all of it the best way again to the supply materials.