An excerpt from my script review for Salem’s Lot (1979) which will be available 10/21/24:
2.) Plot Stability
In typical Stephen King fashion, at least in his earlier works, we’re presented with a little town in Maine with its share of problems.
The novel has the time and pages to slowly introduce the characters, their relationships, and what things are like before everything goes to shit.
The miniseries script being reviewed today had to condense the entire story into just under two hundred pages.
The most recent adaptation? That felt more like a whirlwind tour of Salem’s Lot.
The latter wasn’t horrible, but it did have a “generic” horror sort of feel, perhaps due to details being cut for time.
For the next few points I’ll be taking into account the following three novels, Salem’s Lot, Needful Things, and It.
What Stephen King does right is we’re never given Pleasantville in these small towns.
By that I mean, things are far from perfect, and there’s a certain amount of “sin” taking place even before the monster or bad guy shows up.
The people in these towns, maybe a New England stereotype, always seem to be a particular amount of “miserable” under the surface turning to sin or vice for an escape.
Infidelity, drinking, abuse of spouse/child, pride, jealously, take your pick.
As Ben Mears put it when asked about the Marsten House, evil attracts evil.
Therefore, these people, and the frame of mind they’re in, make it possible to be deceived by the likes of Straker, Gaunt, Pennywise, and others, because they’re looking for a way out of their misery.
Now, I’m in no way victim blaming, but instead stating that, in terms of fiction, the citizens that claim to be holier than thou and usually the ones being tricked first, because behind the scenes we see that their piousness is just a front.
(In Needful Things, Leland Gaunt easily manipulates Catholic and Protestants, both who claim to be children of God.)
And King seems to build upon it in those earlier works, perfecting the formula which seems to compound in It where Derry experiences a really devastating event every 27 years or so when Pennywise wakes up going all the way back to before the Dawn of Man.
Where am I going with this?
As stated in the previous section we may not be Stephen King, but we can certainly emulate part of his formula.
Evil begets evil.
Run with that.
Realize that in this script, although it’s a story of a vampire converting a town, realize that Barlow doesn’t actually feed until almost halfway into the story.
Sure there’s creepy elements related to him, which are all good…
The crate containing Barlow being unnaturally cold and seeming to inch closer to the two drivers in the truck inexplicably.
Characters being unable to do things, Mike trying to fill Danny Glick’s grave but the wind blowing the dirt away as he shovels.
…these good elements lead to a good horror story.
But start with something simple.
Present characters who are already flawed individuals, making them susceptible to various forms of evil.
And present a location that feels lived in, in that we treat it like a real place with a real back story.
Sure you might not have time to draw it all out like writing a novel, but if you take time to set the stage in the first couple of pages with subtext, it’s not impossible.
(Oh, and making characters act practically helps too. The Cap’n mentioned it when talking about the newest movie, that as impossible and impractical as it seems, we all know the signs of vampires and wouldn’t just ignore them.)
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