Salem’s Lot producer explains why his vampire looks more like Nosferatu than Stephen King’s depiction

The new Salem’s Lot movie’s vampire may look nothing like what was written in Stephen King’s pages, but the team took inspiration from one of the scariest fanged beasts in entertainment, the vamp from the 1979 adaptation of, you guessed it, Salem’s Lot. And the movie is all the better for it, says producer Michael Clear. 

“Tobe Hooper’s Barlow had haunted all of us,” Clear tells SFX magazine in the new issue, which features Terrifier 3 on the cover and hits newsstands on October 2. “When something like that is in your nightmares you would be doing a disservice to the movie by not bringing to life the thing that was terrifying to you.”

The Texas Chain Saw Maccsare helmer’s miniseries shocked audiences in the late ‘70s with Hooper’s depiction of Kurt Barlow, the head vampire who moves to a small town in New England and quickly starts to turn its residents into his kin. Those who have seen the series will know that Barlow looks very much like Count Orlak in the 1992 movie Nosferatu, with a pale bald head, sharp claws, and pointed teeth. But that tall shadowy foe was not what King had in mind when he first wrote the novel.

In the book, Barlow is a cultured, charming, and very human-looking man. King was certainly onto something as that is mostly how we see vampires in modern media today. The 2004 Salem’s Lot miniseries took this direction too and presented their vampire as human, but it looks like the new Salem’s Lot has learned from the past and decided to resurrect Hooper’s terrifying yellow-eyed monster one more time.

It’s not just Barlow though, the flick also takes inspiration from another chilling moment we remember all too well from the miniseries. “It’s similar to the Danny at the window scene,” explains Clear, “where we wanted to capture the essence of the thing that has stuck inside of our brains for so long.” The producer goes on to say how the film’s FX team was able to capture elements from Hooper’s version “while allowing us to put a little bit of our own spin on it.”

Barlow is just one part of the story though, as the movie primarily follows author Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) as he returns to his hometown in search of inspiration for his new book, only to find the place crawling with blood-sucking vampires. The film also stars Makenzie Leigh, Alfre Woodard, John Benjamin Hickey, Bill Camp, Jordan Preston Carter, Nicholas Crovetti, William Sadler, and Spencer Treat Clark.

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Salem’s Lot releases on October 3 on Max in the US and in theaters on October 11 in the UK. Read more in the latest issue of SFX magazine, which features Terrifier 3 on the cover and will be available from Wednesday, October 2. 

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