2024-10-05 06:05:03
This article contains spoilers for Salem’s Lot (2024), and mild spoilers for Stephen King’s The Dark Tower novels.
In adapting Stephen King’s second book as a film for the first time (it’s been made twice as a miniseries), Salem’s Lot leaves a lot of the novel’s heart on the page and chooses to focus mostly on middling vampire scares. As a Constant Reader for most of my life, the many missed opportunities Salem’s Lot waves at as it cruises through its overstuffed final act are disappointing, but it could have been worse. You can check out my full review of the movie out yonder way, because from here on out, I’m taking the critic hat off and letting my King freak flag fly.
“Sad to see a man’s faith fail.”
As the townspeople of Salem’s Lot become aware of the encroaching vampire threat, they enlist a theological heavy to hook them up with some holy water, crosses, and spiritual guidance. That heavy is Father Donald Callahan, played here by John Benjamin Hickey. Callahan is an alcoholic priest who clings to what the church once meant to him, and his struggles to maintain that faith in the face of the evil on his doorstep give him about as much depth as any other character in this adaptation (sadly, that’s not much). That faith gets put to the test in a major way late in the film and, even though Salem’s Lot director Gary Dauberman’s off to the races at that point and doesn’t dwell on what’s a key scene from the book, he does take the briefest of moments to include one crucial detail related to Father Callahan that King fans know, simply put, you just cannot f*** with. Not while the Tower still stands.
Father Callahan’s confrontation with the vampire Barlow is one of the very best moments of the book, a final test of the priest’s failing faith. Barlow has young Mark Petrie trapped, but he’s backed into a corner by Callahan and his crucifix. Barlow offers to drop the boy if Callahan will drop his cross, so that each can weigh the strength of their faith against the other, with Barlow quite confident that his dark powers will win the day. The waning power of Callahan’s faith is central to the character’s arc, but until this point, that conflict had been an entirely internal one until it becomes embodied by Barlow’s challenge.
The vampire drops the boy, but Callahan doesn’t trust his faith enough to lower his crucifix. It’s in that moment of hesitation that the holy relic becomes a bunch of crap wood. Barlow descends on Callahan and, rather than kill him, subjects him to a fate worse than death: he forces Callahan to drink his blood, which leaves him alive not quite as a vampire, but supernaturally marked for other vampires and permanently cut off from any holy power that had been protecting him before.
Dauberman’s adaptation omits that last part, and by the time the characters return to this location, Callahan appears to be dead on the ground. A dead-end for a character the movie mostly treats as a dead-end himself. Salem’s Lot plays fast and loose with the big moments of King’s novel, and I begrudge no adaptation truncating events to keep things moving, but I’ll admit this end for Callahan pulled an audibly upset reaction from me.
The Priest’s Tale
There’s a Stephen King adaptation on the horizon that feels almost taboo to mention, for fear that getting too excited for it may lead to some twist of fate (or, Ka) that derails the project. That adaptation is Mike Flanagan’s planned Dark Tower TV series. I don’t want to spoil the nature of King’s genre-bending, seven-novel opus, but what I will say is that there is a heavy amount of self-reflexivity baked into that story where elements of many Stephen King tales come into play. Father Callahan’s life after being marked by Barlow, what happens to him after he leaves Salem’s Lot in disgrace, becomes an important part of the Dark Tower narrative as it winds its way toward its conclusion. If we’re going to weld an MCU glossary term onto all this, Father Callahan being forced to drink Barlow’s blood is as close to a “nexus event,” a fixed point in time, as there is from King’s non-Tower novels, which is why seeing Callahan appear to be dead on the ground sent my King-loving ass through the roof.
I slept on it, and that’s when two minor details that Dauberman seeded in his staging of that scene came into focus. Early in the film, teacher Matt Burke (Bill Camp) mentions a theory that vampirism spreads through different people at different rates. So, for some, they don’t wake up a vampire immediately, and that’s important to remember when Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) and company find Father Callahan at the Petrie house. He’s dead… but maybe only mostly dead. And as our wisdom from Miracle Max tells us, “there’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.”
The second detail is an incredibly brief shot, but no doubt an intentional one: Callahan’s face is smeared with blood (the implication being he drank some Barlow blood!). Dauberman is no King novice (he co-wrote the IT movies), nor does he totally shy away from the more “out there” aspects of the author’s work: give IT’s “Ritual of Chüd” a Google and then give the man credit where it’s due for finding a way to get that onscreen in a blockbuster horror movie. So Dauberman does account for that critical story point, but at that point, the movie’s so focused 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 living.
That’s not to necessarily say that Mike Flanagan (Doctor Sleep, Gerald’s Game) had any sort of hand in any of this – Salem’s Lot was in the can before the announcement that Flanagan had gotten The Dark Tower rights. The shot of Callahan’s bloody mouth is moreso a collegial recognition on Dauberman’s part that representing the true nature of Callahan’s encounter with Barlow is something of a responsibility of his. Whether the backroom dealings that would be necessary to port this specific iteration of the character are even possible remains to be seen (Hickey’s good in the role despite the character being underserved).
Salem’s Lot is a Warner Bros. production, and though Flanagan hasn’t yet announced where his Dark Tower adaptation will be produced, the smart money seems to be on Amazon, where he recently set up a new overall deal. Importantly though, that deal includes a carveout for The Dark Tower: Flanagan can make that one with whichever partners he wants. Flanagan has been adamant that his Dark Tower adaptation will be a quite literal adaptation of the books, so while swapping a different character in for Father Callahan wouldn’t be out of the question, it seems unlikely based on his mission statement for the show, not to mention the fact that watching his Netflix series Midnight Mass will tell you he clearly loves Salem’s Lot… a lot. Flanagan’s adaptation of Doctor Sleep, and the way it reconciles King’s Shining novel with the Kubrick movie and respects that each has a discrete place in pop culture, seems like an indication that the filmmaker is open to leaning on imagery from previous King film and TV adaptations – like Dauberman’s Salem’s Lot – to bridge any knowledge gaps for the audience.
Ka Is a Wheel
It should be noted that even Sony’s disastrous 2017 attempt to adapt The Dark Tower understood that this cross-pollination of King iconography was critical to bringing the story of Roland Deschain to life. However, the manner by which those references are handled illuminates a major reason that initial effort failed as spectacularly as it did. King’s Dark Tower novels blossom with metaphysical weirdness as they go, but they begin with the relatively simple The Gunslinger, which favors introducing central characters Roland, Jake Chamberlain, and the Man in Black. King saves most of the labyrinthine geopolitics of Mid-world and the multiversal self-referentiality for later in the story, so by the time the characters are wandering through the aftermath of the Captain Trips virus from The Stand, or enlisting help from Insomnia’s Patrick Danville, it feels organic to the plot.
The Dark Tower novels – and even the Dark Tower itself – are a celebration of storytelling, so when all The Dark Tower movie includes to represent that theme are quick shots of a “Pennywise” carnival sign or a framed photo of The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, with no care given as to why they’re appearing at all, that shoddy world-building isn’t just a missed opportunity, it goes against the story being told in a very specific and damaging way. In fact, one of the most significant critiques of Nikolaj Arcel’s Dark Tower movie was how it eschewed the slow build of the Dark Tower narrative by pulling threads from later booksk forward in a way that undercut their emotional weight, presumably so the movie could have more action scenes.
There’s no question that Mike Flanagan’s vision of The Dark Tower will account for this nuance, something made very clear by an exchange between Danny Torrance and the ghost of Dick Hallorann in Doctor Sleep. The Shining sequel examines the effect Danny’s traumatic experience at the Overlook had on him as an adult, and how the past manifests in the present is one of the film’s major focuses. Danny is reluctant to help a young girl who’s at the mercy of forces not dissimilar to those at the Overlook, and Dick’s spirit reinforces the karmic need for Danny to pay forward the sacrifice Dick made for Danny by saying “it all comes around. Ka is a wheel.” Dick’s point is clear to Danny, without needing to know what Ka is. But for those of us in the audience who do know something about The Dark Tower’s pervading lifeforce, that brief observation of Dick’s symbolizes an understanding of how to deploy a Stephen King reference in a way that feels both weighty and thematically relevant.
We’ll have to get a little further down the path to find out if Flanagan intends to fold John Benjamin Hickey’s Father Callahan into his Dark Tower adaptation, but if the character does factor into the plot like he does in the books, that very brief shot of Callahan’s mouth covered in vampire blood will have laid a lot of groundwork right under the noses of King fans who only go as far as watching the adaptations without making it all the way back to the source material.
