Salem’s Lot is one of Stephen King’s best books, and though Tobe Hooper’s 1979 TV miniseries adaptation is an uneven creature of the night, it features one scene—of a young vampire trying to gain entry into a friend’s home via a second-floor bedroom window—that’s the stuff of nightmares. Writer/director Gary Dauberman’s new feature version of King’s classic tale restages that iconic moment to lesser results, if only because it lacks the eerie unnaturalness that made it so unforgettable. In most other respects, however, his film is a reasonably faithful and effective thriller, light on legitimate frights but polished and unnerving.

Despite sitting on the shelf for two years (for reasons that make little sense, given the finished product), Salem’s Lot, which premieres Oct. 3 on Max, is an assured spookshow about the Maine town of Jerusalem’s Lot, whose streets are overlooked by the creepy gothic Marsten House. It’s to that abode’s cobwebby cellar that, in 1976, two men haul an enormous crate on the orders of Richard Straker (Pilou Asbæk), a newly arrived businessman who’s opening an antiques shop. These frightened individuals never learn the true contents of this box, but it’s no secret that within it resides Kurt Barlow (Alexander Ward), a malevolent vampire who, it turns out, looks a lot like the Barlow of Hooper’s predecessor: pale bald head, maw full of fangs, long slender fingers with pointy nails, and eyes that glow in the dark.

Straker and Barlow’s appearance in “the Lot” coincides with the return of Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman), an author who lived there........

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