With the new Salem Field adaptation one of several vampire films released theatrically in recent years, you’d be forgiven for assuming that Stephen King’s 1975 novel it was just another story about leeches. But King’s book took the dusty, almost quaint monsters, dropped them into the modern world and made them terrifying for arguably the first time since Richard Matheson published his classic. I am a legend in 1954.

King was just beginning to become the formidable cultural presence he is today, but his story of a small, isolated Maine town overrun by vampires was popular enough that plans to make it into a film were almost underway. upon publication. But that idea quickly clashed with the novel’s structure: over 400 pages, with dozens of colorful characters, King painted a gritty, realistic vision of a rural town that was virtually impossible to distill into 120 minutes of screen time. So producer Richard Kobritz and screenwriter Paul Monash turned to the miniseries format, hoping that an extra hour would give them time to properly develop the people of Jerusalem’s Lot. The result was a two-part, three-hour adaptation (plus an hour of commercials) that premiered on CBS on November 17, 1979.

With Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper at the helm and a cast including David Soul, Bonnie Bedelia, James Mason, Lew Ayres and Fred Willard, Salem Field managed to capture the tone and atmosphere of King’s book even though the screenplay condensed the structure and characters. Hooper, far from ChainsawThe guerrilla production values ​​and nihilistic nightmarish vision created several eerie sequences, despite the need to limit the bloodshed for network television. And King’s sense of community — where people’s lives intersect in small, sometimes scandalous ways — is present, even if the relatively compact length hastens the emptying of the city.

Largely faithful in spirit to King’s book, and quite frightening for its time, Salem Field remains the definitive version of the novel, despite another miniseries adaptation in 2004 and this year’s feature film released on Max. This is partly because the miniseries was largely of its late ’70s era in terms of freshness and competence.

On the one hand, King himself was still a novelty; although Brian de Palma’s hit adaptation of Carrie had been released three years earlier and that of Stanley Kubrick The shiny was underway, the veritable deluge of King adaptations, varying wildly in quality and success, was still a good four years away. King himself still only published one book a year. He began a long period of publishing two to three books a year around the same time that film adaptations were ramping up, making him a much more ubiquitous presence in pop culture.

The miniseries also came at the end of a decade in which horror thrived almost as much on the small screen as it did in theaters. Made-for-TV movies like The night stalker, Duel, Don’t be afraid of the dark, Trilogy of TerrorAnd Frankenstein: the true story were often as intense as the films offered by rising stars like David Cronenberg, John Carpenter and Wes Craven, the latter two also working in television. Salem Fieldbased on a book by the hottest new name in terror and directed by a man with already a subversive horror classic under his belt, seemed to be the crowning achievement of the medium’s genre.

But there may be another reason why this first adaptation of King’s novel is more beloved than subsequent versions: it is the product of an era before smartphones, the Internet, connectivity and GPS, when the idea that people could disappear in a small town off the beaten path was much more plausible than it is today. The miniseries effectively captured the flavor of life in such a city thanks to the storyline giving just enough time to its supporting characters and the simplicity of their lives, a feat that other versions glossed over. And then he started playing with them.

The 2004 adaptation is set in the present, bringing a more modern twist to the proceedings (literally everyone has trauma in his closet), while the Max version, at 114 minutes, is too short to give any real meaning to the city. We have also simply seen vampires many times since 1979, let the tone be more Dusk Or 30 days of night. But the 1979 version of Salem’s Lot was there for the first time, at a time when it was still possible to believe that an entire city could disappear.