The town of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine, suddenly has a surprisingly high mortality rate in Salem’s Lot, a straight down the middle horror story based on the Stephen King novel.
Late 20something, early 30something author Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) returns to the small town of Jersusalem’s Lot in 1975. He grew up in The Lot until age 9 when his parents died in a car accident. He has returned to research a book on something — the town, his parents’ death, the creepy house at the top of the hill? Unclear. What we do learn while he scrolls through microfiche at the town library is that Susan (Makenzie Leigh), a local girl who went to college in Boston but came back to help out her family, is way more interested in Ben than in whatever local weenie her mom is trying to set her up with. Susan yells over to Ben that she’ll be at the drive-in that night, indirectly asking him to hang out with her, which he does.
Also new in town is Mark (Jordan Preston Carter), an elementary schooler who is basically just a Chekov’s gun of skills and knowledge — he’s a fan of classic monster movie monsters, likes to build things, is knowledgeable about Harry Houdini and escape tricks.
Meanwhile, Mark’s new school buddies, brothers Danny (Nicholas Crovetti) and Ralphie (Cade Woodward), are walking home when they run in to another new resident, R.T. Straker (Pilou Asbæk), the co-owner of an antiques shop who has a funny accent and wears odd old-timey clothes. The boys super wisely decline Straker’s offer of a ride but he looks after them menacingly.
Straker has a giant heavy crate shipped to him from Europe and pays some men to take it to the big creepy house on the top of the hill he has recently purchased. The crate is filled with dirt, the men discover, after a slat at the bottom cracks. They run off, Ralphie goes missing shortly thereafter, Danny gets sick after going to look for Ralphie in the middle of the night, another person gets sick after working in the graveyard at night. What could be causing all of this trouble? Is it the world gone mad, as the given-up sheriff (William Sadler) and the depressed, alcoholic priest (John Benjamin Hickey) think? Is it an aggressive form of anemia, as Dr. Cody (Alfre Woodard) diagnoses?
Naw. It’s vampires.
Matt Burke (Bill Camp) figures out “vampires” a few minutes into talking with one “sick” acquaintance and then tells everybody it’s vampires and then everybody is pretty all in on the vampires idea, especially after Mark shows up at the church with a bag of stakes matter-of-factly filling a thermos with holy water in preparation for doing battle. This movie is not, for the most part, jokey-joke funny but it does have a lightness and oftentimes a real brevity in going from “what’s happening” to “vampires.” And we get, at least for a while, a fun Scooby gang of Matt, Mark, Susan, Dr. Cody, the priest and Ben trying to fight the vampires. Individually no particular character is blowing anybody away with their charisma, but they form a good monster fighting team, not all of whom make it, thus providing (ha) stakes.B-
Rated R for bloody violence and language, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Written and directed by Gary Dauberman and based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, Salem’s Lot is an hour and 54 minutes long and is distributed on Max.
Hold Your Breath (R)
Sarah Paulson is a mother losing her mind in Depression/Dust Bowl-era Oklahoma in the Hulu horror movie Hold Your Breath.
Margaret (Paulson) is trying to keep her daughters Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins) alive on their dusty, barren farm, where they have barely enough hay to keep the cow giving milk. Her husband has left to work on a construction project and a younger daughter has died from scarlet fever. Now it is the dust that could kill Margaret’s girls — she shoves fabric in the cracks in her house and makes the girls wear masks when outside but the dust still makes its way in.
The dust and something else? Rose tells Ollie a story about “The Grey Man” who killed his family and then himself died in the flames, becoming dust. If you don’t wear a mask, you might breathe him in and do terrible things — is the story’s warning. Ollie asks a question about Margaret having breathed in the Grey Man — no, Rose tells her, Mommy was just a little off from not sleeping and grief over their baby sister. Thus do we know that Margaret isn’t entirely stable and that the real horrors of their situation easily blend with stories.
Hold Your Breath is largely about what disaster and grief can do to people, how real dangers can become outsized and how reality can become hard to discern. All of this makes for some very solid, relatable horror where you don’t need magical boogeymen to be terrified. B+
Rated R for violence/disturbing images, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Karrie Crouse and Willaim Joines, with a screenplay by Karrie Crouse, Hold Your Breath is an hour and 34 minutes long and distributed by Searchlight. It is streaming on Hulu.
