On the plus side, ‘Salem’s Lot’ is a perfectly watchable slice of horror. It is shot in brown and yellow hues and it has a distinct sense of being set in the 1970s (though the filmmakers try a little too hard here to conjure up the period), when the original TV movie was made. On the downside, it struggles to be an especially memorable or purposeful film, containing flashes of suspense in an otherwise pedestrian retread. There is a genuinely engaging motif of the successful author who returns to his home town of Jerusalem’s Lot to try and confront his own childhood trauma where several of his erstwhile friends went missing.

Moreover, there is much mythology surrounding the events of a few decades earlier, and now that Ben (Lewis Pullman) is back in town then he gets more than he bargained for as vampires are unleashed and he has to save the girl he has just met who, when he first turns up at the estate agent where she is working as a secretary, happens to be reading his latest book, not knowing at first who he is. The townsfolk, from doctors and schoolteachers to clergymen, go vampire-hunting, and ‘Salem’s Lot’ does unfortunately work as a straighter version of the excellent parody of the genre that is ‘Shaun of the Dead’, and this is largely why this new iteration feels so redundant.

The tropes that might have been inventive in 1979, when James Mason and David Soul, appeared in the original, have long since been incorporated into dozens of other films of the genre, and there are tropes here regarding novelists reexperiencing childhood trauma which are common in other Stephen King adaptations. So, why bother with a third interpretation of the story, one deliberately compressed to fit a movie’s running time. No one really doubts that what they are dealing with are vampires, and there is a by-the-numbers ingredient to the way in which the characters set about finding ways – principally from reading old comic books – to ward off Dracula.

Missing are questions of paranoia and race which feature in a manner that is way too dismissive and cursory considering that this is set in the 1970s and has a more diverse cast than the original. So, this is competent, well made (if having vampires fly around rooms and with glowing white eyes, to match the look of the crucifixes that are used to dispel them is not by now rather hackneyed) but really rather unmemorable.