This 1987 Sequel is the Weirdest Stephen King Movie Ever Made
Stephen King movies have been a cottage industry for so long that things were always bound to get weird. By the mid-1980s, King’s novels were pretty much automatically making their way to the big screen, and even his short stories were getting major adaptations. It wouldn’t be long before we started getting completely new works set in King’s worlds, films based on his concepts more than his actual narratives.
That’s where the weirdness comes in, and it begins, believe it or not, with the very first movie sequel to a Stephen King story. Yes, before Children of the Corn spun off half a dozen follow-ups, before we went back to the Pet Sematary, and even before The Lawnmower Man did…well, whatever it was that happened in that movie, there was A Return to Salem’s Lot. Released in 1987 and directed and co-written by cult cinema icon Larry Cohen, it stands today as the first King sequel that King himself had nothing to do with, and despite all the weirdness that’s come since, it’s still the weirdest Stephen King movie ever.
Why Even Make a Sequel To This Stephen King Classic?
A sequel to Salem’s Lot makes sense in some ways, to the point that King has even revisited the story in his Dark Tower saga and in the short story “One for the Road.” It’s one of those things that leaves a few loose ends another storyteller could pick at. But when Cohen signed on to make a sequel for Warner Bros.—in part so he could also make It’s Alive III—he opted to ignore everything but the setting and the idea that the town of Jerusalem’s Lot in Maine had been taken over by vampires. Slight continuity connections aside, it’s an in-name-only sequel. While another filmmaker might have just used that setup for a sort of carbon copy retread of Salem’s Lot, Cohen was always too audacious for that sort of vanilla approach.
So, he dreamed up the story of an anthropologist named Joe (Michael Moriarty), a guy so devoted to capturing the realities of a given society that he’ll let people die on camera for the sake of his research. Joe’s been called home from the jungle because his son Jeremy (Ricky Addison Reed) is acting out. Thinking maybe a little fresh air is in order, Joe takes Jeremy to his hometown in Maine, Salem’s Lot, where he’s inherited an old farmhouse. What he doesn’t know, of course, is that while he was away on assignment, Salem’s Lot happened. So now, the town is a secret vampire colony.
A Seemingly Peaceful Vampire Colony
By the time Joe arrives, though, the Lot is not a place of carnage and destruction. It’s a quaint little New England town where a few human “drones” look after things by day, and the vampire society comes out at night. They’re respectable, old-world types, led by the wise and even sometimes kindly Judge Axel (Andrew Duggan). When they realize what Joe does for a living, they present him with an offer: Keep living in the town, coexist with the vampires, and help them write a kind of “Bible” for their society, as well as a history of their lives as, in their eyes, an oppressed people forced to keep to the shadows. With Joe’s help, they won’t be in the shadows anymore, and people can come to understand vampires on a global scale.
This setup provides a wonderfully economical story engine for Cohen, who takes Joe on a tour of this vampire community. They have specially bred drones to keep peace during the day, which feed on the blood of dairy cows because things like AIDS have made human blood more dangerous to drink. This community prides itself on certain societal niceties, helped along by centuries of hoarding wealth. It’s also a vehicle for an immediate contrast between the polite, even welcoming vampires and what they do behind the scenes. This includes a brutal ambush on tourists and passers-by who just happen to have the bad luck of showing up while the vampires are cutting loose and having a few sips of human blood.
A Strange New World
With this contrast in premise, Cohen starts to gradually and brilliantly morph the story around Joe’s perception of his new subject. After all, Joe knows that people around the world participate in violent rituals as part of their culture. So what’s the difference when it’s a vampire? What does the vampiric society have to say about our own? What do they contribute to the world? These are good questions, and Cohen makes us as an audience wonder right away, as the film lays out its ideas with a macabre sense of humor, just how far Joe will go for science. How far is too far when you’re following the ultimate predators around?
It’s here that the horror starts to set in, along with a blistering satirical take on Reagan-era America, a time when the rich and established were waxing poetic about a shining city upon a hill while “drones” were doing all the real work, and the poor, the lost, and the disenfranchised were paying the price. It’s fascinating to watch Cohen build these ideas out, particularly when he brings in legendary filmmaker Samuel Fuller (The Big Red One) to play a World War II veteran in Salem’s Lot for his own reasons, who teaches Joe a thing or two about necessary evils.
Ok, So Why Is This The Weirdest Stephen King Film Ever Made?
So, why is all of this the weirdest King film ever made? It might not have been when it was released, particularly since no other sequels of its kind had yet come along. With the benefit of hindsight, we of course have any number of weird outliers in the Stephen King movie world, everything from The Mangler 2 to Children of the Corn: Genesis. But while those films are certainly odd in their ability to grasp at Stephen King-connected straws, A Return to Salem’s Lot still stands out as a remarkable piece of what was, even at the time, IP farming gone right.
Cohen got to make the film because Stephen King and Salem’s Lot were known quantities. He used that boost to do something truly audacious and original with the bare bones of King’s concept. It’s not a piece for Salem’s Lot continuity hounds, to be sure, but it is a film only Larry Cohen could have made at that specific time and that specific place. In an age when every Stephen King title is a potential new tentpole, it’s hard to imagine a film like this getting made now. Even if someone tried, it wouldn’t have the Larry Cohen flair, the sense of American decay sometimes literally draped in the Stars and Stripes.
Stephen King movies won’t be stopping soon, but even as we add more and more to the canon, rest assured that we’ll never get another quite like this.
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