Author Ben Mears comes back to the small town of Salem's Lot where his parents tragically died. He's there to research a new book possibly about the Marston family history. The Marston House overlooks the town. Coinciding with his arrival, a young boy goes missing. Then his brother tragically dies and a gravedigger falls ill. All is not well in the town of Salem's Lot and the fight for survival is on.

Considering we already had the thoroughly excellent TV version of SALEM'S LOT in 1979 and the decidedly average TV version in SALEM'S LOT in 2004, it's a fair question to ask if we really needed a new version of Stephen King's vampires overrun a small American town story. Of course, with the runaway success of the two part film version of IT it was probably inevitable that a raid of the horrormeister's back catalogue would take place.

With a much reduced running time compared to the two TV versions, it is a case of what has been removed from this adaptation rather than what has been added. Quite a lot, is the answer. The storyline is fairly faithful to the King story for a large part, but the book is a slow burn, introducing us to the titular town and its inhabitants. We get to know them in all their ordinariness and quirkiness. When the early unsettling sequence regarding the transporting a large crate is jettisoned right at the start, it's clear that the long, lingering set up and the creeping dread are not going to be much in evidence. Also not much in evidence is the Marston House, which forms such a focus of the book and the other adaptations. The house overlooks the town and casts a malign shadow. Its presence and its evil permeates the whole book and it is the centre of all the evil in the town. Apart from a couple of scenes, it barely features. The same can be said of Straker, the human servant of the head vampire and the main threat for the first half of the book. Here, he kidnaps a child and gets killed by another and that's it. We also aren't given any time to get to know the characters of the town and so it's very hard to care when they get murdered and come back as vampires.

This may streamline the plot and get us to the scares and action of the later sections of the film more efficiently, but it waters down the scares when they come and turns the cold fingers of terror into the tepid digits of jump scares and not much else.

At least they had the sense to retain some of the more successful elements of the earlier adaptations. Rather than the elegant gentleman of the book and later version, Barlow reverts back to the more NOSFERATU-like creature of the 1979 Tobe Hooper classic. This is vital since he is on screen for such a short time that his appearance has to do all the heavy lifting in making him the monster of the piece. The effects make-up is well-done in updating the original look. The scene in the graveyard after Danny Glick's funeral is another set piece that works well enough, spending a little time to build up the tension before the inevitable jump scare. And Danny Glick at the window moment is very nicely handled as well, a vital set piece that needed to be handled right.

There is very little that is added to the book or other versions. The kidnapping of the first boy is shown more and introduces the vampire master earlier on than in the others and the moment of snatching has a nicely baroque feel to it with the background lighting. Mark Petrie being besieged in his tree house is another nice image. The ending is transposed from the Marston House to the drive-in, which sounds ridiculous, but actually works quite well, though it completely misses the emotional impact of one kill on the heroes and ends in a rather sudden and anticlimactic fashion.

The cast do what they can, but they just aren't given enough to work with. There isn't time to study Ben's background or his romance with Susan, Mark's friendship with the Glick brothers is perfunctory, which makes his determination to avenge them harder to understand and the rest of the adults are barely cyphers (drunk priest, cowardly sheriff, grumpy doctor, overprotective mother etc etc).

When refashioning any previously made work, there needs to be some new vision as to what it is or how it needs to be told. This version of SALEM'S LOT has nothing at all new to say and rather less than either of the TV versions. If you really want to experience the story on screen, then the 1979 version remains the essential adaptation.