A Return to Salem's Lot | |
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UK VHS cover
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Directed by | Larry Cohen |
Produced by | Larry Cohen Paul Kurta |
Written by | Larry Cohen James Dixon |
Starring |
Michael Moriarty Andrew Duggan Samuel Fuller Evelyn Keyes June Havoc |
Music by | Michael Minard |
Edited by | Armond Leibowitz |
Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
Release date
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September 11, 1987 |
Running time
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100 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
A Return to Salem's Lot is a 1987 American horror film co-written and directed by Larry Cohen and starring Michael Moriarty, Andrew Duggan and Samuel Fuller. It is a sequel to the classic 1979 miniseries Salem's Lot.
Michael Moriarty plays an amoral anthropologist who has been lumbered with his dysfunctional adolescent son (Ricky Addison Reed) and who returns to Salem's Lot, the town of his birth, to find that it has been taken over by the undead. A few living people are kept around to provide blood for the vampires and to operate the gas station and shops in the daytime. Knowing of the anthropologist's refusal to moralise about other people's lifestyles (in the opening scene he is seen refusing to interfere in a human sacrifice and concerned only for the quality of the film he is shooting), the vampires employ him to write their story. As the vampires' evil nature becomes clear, the anthropologist is joined by a Nazi hunter (played by Samuel Fuller) who helps him save his son, and at the climax the master vampire is impaled on the American flag instead of the traditional stake. As the trio escapes Salem's Lot, the vampires are left in the sun to burn along with their homes.
The film was given a limited release theatrically in the United States by Warner Bros. in 1987. It was released on VHS by Warner Home Video the following year. The film was released to burn-on -demand DVD by the Warner Archive Collection in 2010.