Salem's Lot doesn't ignore the book's most important Stephen King Easter egg

This article contains spoilers for Salem's Lot (2024) and mild spoilers for Stephen King's The Dark Tower novels.

In the first film adaptation of Stephen King's second book (it was made twice as a miniseries) Salem's property The novel leaves much of the core of the novel on the page, focusing mostly on mediocre vampire angst. As a constant reader for most of my life, the many missed opportunities that “Salem's Lot” beckons during its overstuffed final act are disappointing, but it could have been worse. You can check out my full review of the film over there, because from now on I'm taking off my critic hat and letting my King Freak flag fly.

“Sad to see a man’s faith fail.”

When the townspeople of Salem's Lot become aware of the impending threat of vampires, they hire a theologian to provide them with holy water, crosses and spiritual guidance. This heavy is Father Donald Callahan, played here by John Benjamin Hickey. Callahan is an alcoholic priest who clings to what the church once meant to him, and his struggles to maintain that faith in the face of evil on his doorstep give him about as much depth as any other character in this adaptation (unfortunately that is not the case). much). This belief is tested again towards the end of the film, and although Gary Dauberman, director of “Salem's Lot”, is on his way to the races at the time and is not dealing with the key scene in the book, he takes but the chance shortest of moments to include a crucial detail regarding Father Callahan that King fans know you just can't mess with. Not while the tower is still standing.

Father Callahan's confrontation with the vampire Barlow is one of the book's best moments, a final test of the priest's waning faith. Barlow has young Mark Petrie trapped, but is cornered by Callahan and his crucifix. Barlow offers to drop the boy if Callahan drops his cross so that each can weigh the strength of their faith against the other, with Barlow quite confident that his dark forces will prevail. The waning strength of Callahan's faith is central to the character's plot, but up to this point this conflict has been entirely internal until it is embodied by Barlow's challenge.

The vampire drops the boy, but Callahan doesn't trust his faith enough to lower his crucifix. In this moment of hesitation, the holy relic turns into a pile of dungwood. Barlow pounces on Callahan and instead of killing him, he subjects him to a fate worse than death: he forces Callahan to drink his blood, which does not leave him alive quite as a vampire, but supernaturally marked for other vampires and permanently cut off from any holy power that had previously protected him.

In Dauberman's adaptation, this last part is omitted, and when the characters return to this location, Callahan appears to be lying dead on the ground. A dead end for a character that the film itself largely treats as a dead end. “Salem's Lot” plays fast and loose with the big moments of King's novel, and I don't begrudge an adaptation that cuts events away to keep things moving, but I will admit that this Callahan ending got an audibly annoyed reaction from me caused.

The Priest's Story

There's a Stephen King adaptation on the horizon that's almost taboo to mention for fear that too much excitement could lead to a twist of fate (or Ka) that derails the project. This adaptation is Mike Flanagan's planned Dark Tower TV series. I don't want to give away the nature of King's genre-bending, seven-novel work, but I will say that there is a lot of self-reflection inherent in this story, in which elements of many Stephen King stories come into play. Father Callahan's life after being marked by Barlow, and what happens to him after he leaves Salem's Lot in disgrace, becomes an important part of the Dark Tower narrative as it nears its conclusion. If we want to tie all of this together with an MCU glossary term, the fact that Father Callahan is forced to drink Barlow's blood is as close to a “nexus event,” a fixed point in time, as it is in King's non-Tower novels the reason why my king-loving ass went through the roof when I saw Callahan seemingly dead on the floor.

I slept on it, and that's when two little details that Dauberman incorporated into his staging of this scene became clear. Early in the film, teacher Matt Burke (Bill Camp) mentions a theory that vampirism spreads at different rates in different people. So some don't wake up a vampire right away, and that's important to remember when Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) and company find Father Callahan in the Petrie house. He's dead… but maybe only mostly dead. And as our wisdom from Miracle Max tells us, “There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is a little bit alive.”

The second detail is an incredibly brief shot, but undoubtedly an intentional one: Callahan's face is smeared with blood (suggesting he drank some Barlow blood!). Dauberman isn't a King newbie (he co-wrote the IT films), nor does he entirely shy away from the more “external” aspects of the author's work: Google IT's “Ritual of Chüd” and give that Man then the honor where it is due, find a way to get there The on screen in a blockbuster horror film. So Dauberman does Explain this critical point in the story, but at this point the film is so focused on moving from one vampire encounter to the next that they don't have time to delve into the priest's melancholy banishment from the world of the living.

That doesn't necessarily mean that Mike Flanagan (“Doctor Sleep,” “Gerald's Game”) had any involvement – “Salem's Lot” was in play before it was announced that Flanagan had gotten the rights to “The Dark Tower.” Rather, the inclusion of Callahan's bloody mouth is a collegial admission on Dauberman's part that it is, in some sense, his job to portray the true nature of Callahan's encounter with Barlow. It remains to be seen whether the backroom dealings that would be necessary to port this particular version of the character are even possible (Hickey plays the role well, despite the character being undercast).

Salem's Lot is a Warner Bros. production and while Flanagan has yet to announce where his Dark Tower adaptation will be produced, the smart money appears to be on Amazon, where he recently inked a new overall deal. What's important, however, is that this deal includes a spin-off for The Dark Tower: Flanagan can do this with any partner. Flanagan insisted that his The Dark Tower adaptation will be a completely literal adaptation of the books. Therefore, while it wouldn't be out of the question to replace Father Callahan with another character, it seems unlikely given his mission statement for the series. Not to mention the fact that if you watch his Netflix series “Midnight Mass,” you'll see that he clearly loves “Salem's Lot”… a lot. Flanagan's adaptation of Doctor Sleep and the way it balances King's The Shining novel with the Kubrick film, respecting that both have their own place in pop culture, seems to be an indication that the filmmaker is open to it is to rely on images from previous King film and TV adaptations – such as Dauberman's Salem's Lot – to fill in any gaps in knowledge for the audience.

Ka is a wheel

It should be noted that even with Sony's disastrous attempt in 2017 to adapt The Dark Tower, it was clear that this cross-pollination of King iconography was crucial to bringing Roland Deschain's story to life. However, the way these references are handled highlights a key reason why the initial efforts failed so spectacularly. King's Dark Tower novels flourish with metaphysical weirdness over time, but they begin with the relatively simple “The Gunslinger,” which introduces main characters Roland, Jake Chamberlain, and the Man in Black. King saves most of Mid-World's labyrinthine geopolitics and multiversal self-referentiality for later in the story, when the characters are navigating the aftermath of The Stand's Captain Trip virus or help by Patrick Danville from Insomnia, it feels organic to the plot.

The Dark Tower novels – and even the Dark Tower itself – are a celebration of storytelling. So if all “The Dark Tower” movies to portray this theme are quick shots of a “Pennywise” carnival sign or a framed photo of the Overlook Hotel from “The Shining,” regardless of why they show up in the first place, this one is shoddy World building is not only a missed opportunity, but contradicts the story being told in a very concrete and damaging way. In fact, one of the most significant criticisms of Nikolaj Arcel's Dark Tower film was that it avoided the slow build of the Dark Tower narrative by pulling threads from later books forward in a way that undermined their emotional weight, presumably thereby making the film more so could have action scenes.

There's no question that Mike Flanagan's vision of The Dark Tower will explain this nuance, which was made very clear by an exchange between Danny Torrance and the ghost of Dick Hallorann in Doctor Sleep. The Shining sequel explores the impact Danny's traumatic experience at the Overlook had on him as an adult, and how the past manifests itself in the present is one of the film's main focuses. Danny is hesitant to help a young girl at the mercy of forces not unlike those in the Overlook, and Dick's spirit reinforces Danny's karmic need to redress the sacrifice Dick has made for Danny, saying “Everything will pass. “Ka is a wheel.” Dick's point of view is clear to Danny without him having to know what Ka is. But for those of us in the audience who know something about the pervasive life force of the Dark Tower, this brief observation from Dick symbolizes an understanding of how to implement a Stephen King reference in a way that feels both weighty and feels thematically relevant.

We'll have to go a little further to find out whether Flanagan intends to include John Benjamin Hickey's Father Callahan in his adaptation of The Dark Tower, but if the character actually figures into the plot as he does in the books, that's a very short story The inclusion of Callahan's mouth covered in vampire blood will have laid a lot of groundwork right under the noses of King fans who only go so far as to watch the adaptations without going all the way back to the source material.