When Jeremy becomes sensitive to sunlight and grows ill, Joe realizes he has already begun his transformation. Meanwhile, Jeremy attests to Joe that he plans to become a vampire and live eternally in the community.
Joe soon rekindles a romance with Cathy (also a vampire), a woman whom he had an affair with as a teenager. The school principal also explains the vampires' origins, and how they traveled to the United States concurrent to the pilgrims. At a nighttime school meeting, Jeremy and Joe learn that the townspeople have bred "drones", people who can safely be exposed to sunlight in order to oversee daily operations of the community, maintaining a façade of normalcy. During the tour, Joe is met by his Aunt Clara, whom he believed to be dead-she, too, a vampire.īewildered by what he has learned, Joe no less decides to remain in Salem's Lot and renovate his familial home. To remedy this, Axel has arranged for the locals to primarily feast on the blood of live cows at their local dairy. Axel gives Joe a tour of the town, during which he explains the dangers of drinking human blood in the late 20th-century, amongst them various contractible viruses such as hepatitis and AIDS. Axel attempts to appeal to Joe's objective anthropological methodology, hoping he can give their community mainstream exposure, and eventually write a religious text for their people. To Joe's shock, Judge Axel reveals himself and the townspeople to be vampires. When Sherry notices one of her attackers at the gathering, she becomes hysterical, and is escorted to another room to be killed and fed upon. At the urging of her grandmother, Amanda takes Jeremy on a tour of the town while the adults congregate. Inside, Joe, Sherry, and Jeremy are welcomed to a dinner attended by various high society, among them Amanda Fenton, the young granddaughter of the town doctor. Joe brings Sherry to meet with Judge Axel, the town mayor, to report the incident. Sherry, one of the teenagers, manages to hide out in a church before fleeing to the outskirts of town, stumbling into Joe and Jeremy's home. One night, a group of teenagers are stopped by police officers who subsequently-along with other various townspeople-begin feeding on them.
Unbeknownst to Joe, Salem's Lot is in fact a vampire colony. Joe takes custody of Jeremy, and decides to return to his hometown of Salem's Lot, Maine, where he owns an abandoned, rundown farmhouse passed down to him by his deceased Aunt Clara.
Joe Weber, an anthropologist working in South America, is summoned back to the United States by his ex-wife, Sally, who informs him that their dysfunctional adolescent son, Jeremy, will be committed to a psychiatric institution if Joe does not intervene. While writing the screenplay, Cohen was inspired by Thornton Wilder's play Our Town, and sought to rework familiar tropes of the vampire film, presenting the vampires as typical Americans descended from Europe, having fled their native country to establish a colony in America in the 1600s.įilmed in Vermont in late 1986, A Return to Salem's Lot was screened at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival before receiving a limited theatrical release from Warner Bros. Years later, the studio approached Cohen to writer and direct a low-budget feature for them he proposed a sequel to Salem's Lot. A theatrical sequel to the 1979 miniseries Salem's Lot, the film follows an anthropologist and his son who encounter supernatural incidents and vampirism in the small town of Salem's Lot.Ĭohen had previously written a screenplay for the 1979 Salem's Lot miniseries that had been rejected by Warner Bros. A Return to Salem's Lot is a 1987 American vampire film co-written and directed by Larry Cohen and starring Michael Moriarty, Andrew Duggan, Samuel Fuller, Evelyn Keyes, and June Havoc.
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