“My first cut was about three hours,” the filmmaker confirms. “There’s a lot left out. My first draft of the script is 180-odd pages or something because you’re trying to include everything. And a lot of it has to do with a lot of the secondary characters and stuff that I spoke about. So it was sad to see that stuff go, but it’s like a necessary evil.”
One of the most difficult things that Dauberman let go was an incident that occurs in the past of writer Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman), when as a child he sneaked into the Marsten House—the abandoned mansion that broods over Salem’s Lot—and had what may have been a supernatural experience.
“In the book, Ben sneaks into the Marsten House and he sees the ghost of Hubert Marsten,” the director explains. “I shot that and it used to open the movie, but it seemed to muddy the waters for audiences; the ghost story within the vampire story. To me it’s so important because it’s why Ben believes the vampire stuff, but we’re not telling that story, so that was the hardest thing to cut because I love the sequence.” While Dauberman did pare down his story to just under two hours (and there’s no indication yet on whether a director’s cut could surface in the future), his Salem’s Lot does include a number of iconic sequences from the book. Among those are the capture of the Glick brothers by the vampire Barlow’s human henchman, Straker (Pilou Asbæk), grave digger Mike Ryerson (Spencer Treat Clark) being compelled to open Danny Glick’s (Nicholas Cravetti) coffin, Danny’s spectral appearance at the window of young monster hunter Mark Petrie (Jordan Preston Carter), among others.
The film also retains the blossoming romance between Ben and local girl Susan Norton (Makenzie Leigh), as well as the main characters assembling to confront and destroy Barlow (Alexander Ward). “I love all that,” says Dauberman. “Those were the kind of scenes that we were not going to touch.”
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Just finished the chapter where he
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