King’s much-ballyhooed narrative trope of bringing traditional old-school horror into the everyday world of today works perfectly within the hands of Hooper. From De Palma to Kubrick, Cronenberg to Carpenter, has any author scored this many cinematic heavyweights adapting his works right out of the gates? With my latest cinematic mission with my 15 year old daughter (taking a break between “The Walking Dead” seasons, that is) of watching all things King (well, at least until we start getting to too many bad ones in a row, but that won’t be until we reach the aughts), it’s been lots of enjoyment re-watching these earliest ones, at a time when King’s assembly line-arriving books were feeling so vibrant and fresh (a feeling which slowly dissipated for me, finally ending for good about halfway through his painfully indulgent It, from which, when finally I had slogged through its interminable 1200 pages, I never returned again), and the cinematic masters adapting them were at the heights of inspiration (one of the selfish benefits of being a parent, by the way, is both revisiting magical stuff you’ve always wanted to but might never have made time for, or finally catching great stuff you missed the first go-round and likely otherwise would never have gone back to, such as the absolutely brilliant, television-landscape changing Buffy, The Vampire Slayer series), and that includes this wonderfully crafted (and that’s even acknowledging the deliberate padding required to pace the film out over consecutive two-hour network television slots), faithful adaption by another genre legend, he who exploded on the scene with his infamously nihilistic, still harrowing masterpiece Texas Chainsaw Massacre… none other than Tobe Hooper.
Successful novelist Ben Mears (David Soul) returns to his sleepy childhood home in Maine, the one with the great name of Salem’s Lot (Stephen King rocked it with that title), only to be shocked by the discovery of the residents being turned, one by one, into creatures of the night (as my daughter exclaimed when recognition hit her at about the one hour mark into this over 3 hour film, ‘Oh, they’re vampires!’)… and a growing certainty that the horror destroying the town emanates from that damn haunted Marsten House, looming from the hill above, and its new occupants, the unseen Barlow and his weirdo business ‘partner’ Straker (James Mason).
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