Your Daily Dracula – Jerusalem’s Lot week #1, Reggie Nalder as Kurt Breichen/Barlow, Salem’s Lot (1979)
Stephen King’s source novel reworks Dracula and Peyton Place, but [Tobe] Hooper’s film lives under the baleful shadow of Psycho. Leatherface’s murders are horrifying because they deliberately avoid echoes of those in the Hitchcock film, but in ’Salem’s Lot Hooper recreates the famous attack on Martin Balsam as James Mason throws Ed Flanders against a wall of piercing antlers. Harry Sukman’s score poaches its screeching violins from Bernard Herrmann, and a swinging lantern plus final flash superimposition turn Barlow (Reggie Nalder), the Nosferatu-faced King Vampire, into the twin brother of Norman’s mummified mother. Although ’Salem’s Lot is not the tedious disaster that the mini-series adaption of Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home turned out to be, it’s respectable rather than devastating. Hooper’s personality is evident from the grimy walls of the vampire’s house and the restless camerawork, but he is subdued by the constraints of network censorship. The physical nastiness necessary to Hooper and King is tidied up considerably. Rather than shove a shotgun down Fred Willard’s throat, a cuckolded trucker simply points the weapon at him; and the Willard character’s later meeting with the vampire as, fouled and humiliated, he crawls away from the scene is replaced with a meaningless freeze-frame claw. The strongest element of the film is James Mason’s performance as Richard K. Straker, an acidic descendant of Dracula’s fly-eating disciple, happiest when trading insults with bothersome humanity (‘you’ll enjoy Mr Barlow and he’ll enjoy you’), and providing a nice line in ambiguous glances and nasal sneers.
From Nightmare Movies
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