Salem’s Lot Reboot Gets Major Release Update

Earlier this year came the surprising news that Warner Bros. had removed the upcoming reboot of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot from their release calendar. This came after a previous delay in the vampire movie, leading many to worry that perhaps the movie was being cancelled outright (which isn’t out of the question since Warner Bros. Discovery has been doing that a lot lately). The film just secured a major update for its release prospects however with the Motion Picture Association confirming the movie has been officially rated. As expected, the new Salem’s Lot is rated R for “R for bloody violence and language.”

Filmmaker Gary Dauberman, who previously cut his Stephen King teeth by adapting IT into the two feature films, wrote and directed the adaptation. Dauberman previously wrote several films in The Conjuring franchise, including directing Annabelle Comes Home. The new film stars Lewis Pullman, Makenzie Leigh, Alfre Woodard, Bill Camp, John Benjamin Hickey, Nicholas Crovetti, Jordan Preston Carter, William Sadler, Spencer Treat Clark, Cade Woodward, Debra Christofferson, and Pilou Asbaek. 

“It’s a scary thing doing these remakes, man. It’s like, this and [Top Gun: Maverick], there’s such pressure, it’s a hard concoction to conjure up to make it successful,” Pullman previously told ComicBook.com about the film. “But Gary Dauberman, the director, is really keen on doing justice to the book. But also, the previous adaptation was a two-parter, because it’s such a hefty book and there are so many different moving parts and so many characters. So there are some parts where Gary had to press and find what was really at the heart of the movie to keep in, but for the most part, he’s really true to the book and keeping a lot of the original dialogue in there. He’s a Stephen King hound dog so he doesn’t wanna do Stephen dirty.” 

Pullman stars in the movie as lead character Ben Mears, who returns to his childhood home Jerusalem’s Lot while attempting to work on his next novel only to realize that a vampire has taken hold of the town. Makenzie Leigh (Gotham, The Assistant) as Susan Norton, Mears’ love interest and a helpful hand in the fight against the vampire; Bill Camp (Joker) as Matthew Burke, a local high school English teacher that reveals to Mears the evils of the Marsten House; and Spencer Treat Clark (Unbreakable) as Mike Ryerson, the local gravedigger who becomes one of the town’s vampires.

Salem’s Lot does not have a release date, but now that it has a rating, that’s naturally the next step.