When Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot first aired as a two-part miniseries in 1979, it terrified audiences with its slow, unnerving atmosphere and deep moral questions. Now restored in glorious 4K, the film finds new resonance in an age where small towns across America seem trapped between memory and decay.
The eerie fictional town of Jerusalem’s Lot, frozen in time, feels uncannily modern, as if its gloom has spread beyond fiction.
Based on Stephen King’s second novel, Salem’s Lot follows Ben Mears, a writer returning to his childhood home in Maine to confront personal ghosts and begin a new project about the local haunted estate, the Marsten House.
Played by David Soul, Ben arrives expecting inspiration but instead enters a nightmare rooted in something older and far darker than his trauma. The mansion’s new owner, Mr. Straker, an aristocratic outsider with too much mystery and too little warmth, becomes the key to a rising wave of terror.
When people begin disappearing and returning pale and hollow-eyed, Ben and a handful of townsfolk must question not only what stalks their neighbors but also whether their own ignorance helped it grow.
The new 4K restoration showcased at Beyond Fest reveals stunning detail and texture that amplify Hooper’s haunting imagery, the blue-tinted fog, the glimmer of candlelight on coffins, and the black windows of the Marsten House that seem to stare back.
These improvements don’t just beautify the film. They make its central metaphor feel even sharper: decay can be dressed in nostalgia but not hidden from sight.
Hooper and King: Masters of Small-Town Horror
Stephen King often builds his nightmares from the familiar. His fictional Maine houses secrets behind white fences and church steeples. In Salem’s Lot, that idea found one of its most potent early forms. The town is small, tight-knit, and proud of its traditions until those very comforts become blindfolds.
Tobe Hooper, fresh from redefining horror with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, understood this instinctively. His direction lingers over peeling wallpaper, quiet porches, and derelict storefronts long before fangs ever appear. The town feels sick before the first bite.
Together, King and Hooper created a horror story that goes beyond supernatural motives. Vampirism becomes a symptom, not the disease. The real sickness lies in the repression, greed, and moral fatigue that have hollowed out the residents long before the vampire’s arrival.
King’s characters gossip, cheat, and betray each other while pretending politeness. Hooper films them with melancholy calm, as if waiting for their souls to drain naturally.
One of Salem’s Lot’s most striking scenes comes when Ben Mears discusses the nature of evil with his former teacher, Jason. Ben asks if a place can be inherently evil, invoking the cursed Marsten House.
Jason responds with a question that hits harder than any supernatural revelation: Why does that house attract you, then? The exchange crystallizes the film’s theme that evil is not confined to haunted buildings or monsters but may stem from the human need to dance with our fears.
This psychological depth is what separates Salem’s Lot from lesser horror fare. While the vampires are memorably frightening, the real terror lies in reflection.
Ben’s creative fixation parallels the way townsfolk cling to routine even as corruption spreads. The biggest threat to Salem’s Lot isn’t Mr. Straker or his undead master; it’s the comfort of denial.
A Rebirth That Feels Terrifyingly Timely
Viewed today, Salem’s Lot feels more like prophecy than a period piece. The restoration’s clean visuals make the fictional Maine town resemble countless real American suburbs still clinging to mid-century nostalgia. In 2025, the contrast between then and now feels almost symbolic.
Once-proud communities across the country are dwindling, haunted by the loss of small businesses, vanishing youth populations, and eroding civic trust. Hooper’s movie, conceived over four decades ago, translates that fear into supernatural language.
Salem’s Lot 4K (Credit: HBO Max)
King and Hooper use outsiders to expose a community’s weaknesses. Mr. Straker’s refined manners and foreign accent trigger suspicion, yet those prejudices keep the townspeople distracted while genuine corruption spreads within. The parallels to modern fears of outsiders, whether immigrants or cultural change, are hard to miss.
Hooper’s camera turns that unease back on the audience: perhaps the real intruder is the one who refuses to look beyond his own comfort.
A sequence featuring the missing Glick boys carries even more emotional weight today. Mark, the surviving friend and a young horror enthusiast, recognizes the truth faster than any adult. His imagination becomes his shield, his understanding of monsters literal and social.
This theme of generational awareness, youth seeing what adults refuse to admit, echoes through today’s conversations about environment, technology, and community breakdown.
Hooper’s visual language amplifies these meanings. The fog that rolls into town feels machine-made, a cloud of denial. Half-empty church pews and boarded homes hint that faith and industry have crumbled.
Even small details, like flickering neon in the local diner, symbolize how hope struggles to stay lit. The Marsten House looms above it all like a monument to forgotten sins.
Why Salem’s Lot Still Matters
The brilliance of Salem’s Lot lies in its patience. Hooper doesn’t rush to reveal his monsters; instead, he builds dread from quiet observation. The vampires could remain unseen, and the tension would still work.
When they finally emerge pale, feral, and strangely sorrowful, the effect is devastating precisely because the audience has already sensed decay in everyone else.
This structure also reinforces King’s recurring question: Can evil truly be destroyed, or only displaced? When Ben Mears and Mark finally leave the burning town, it’s clear their victory is incomplete.
The vampires may perish, but the moral infection that allowed them entry remains. That ambiguity makes the story timeless, grounding its supernatural events in genuine emotional truth.
Today’s 4K rerelease does more than restore a classic; it reframes it. Watching Salem’s Lot in today’s cultural moment feels like confronting a lingering ghost of our past optimism.
The small-town ideal once symbolized unity and innocence, but Hooper and King show that underneath the nostalgia lurks hunger, both literal and metaphorical. It’s a hunger for belonging, for control, for purity, that too easily curdles into destruction.
Every flicker of that restored footage reminds viewers that the past is neither dead nor gone; it’s undead, feeding on memory until it turns hollow. Salem’s Lot endures because its fear is not about monsters at the door but what we choose to ignore once they’re inside.
Few comedians have built their careers on honesty quite like Marc Maron. Since launching WTF with Marc Maron in 2009, he has become the model for unfiltered conversation, his tone weary yet warm, cynical yet searching.
Across 1,600 episodes, Maron has opened his garage studio to countless guests, from President Barack Obama to Robin Williams, and revealed more of himself in the process. His interviews, often tinged with therapy-like depth, created a blueprint for modern podcasting.
Yet Are We Good?, directed by Steven Feinartz, shows a different side of Maron. Shot during the pandemic and shaped by his grief over losing filmmaker Lynn Shelton, it captures him stripped of both stage armor and performer bravado.
Feinartz has worked closely with Maron before on specials like From Bleak to Dark and Panicked, but this project feels deeply personal, marked by friendship and loss.
The film weaves archival footage, podcast audio, and Instagram Live clips into a layered narrative that charts how Maron’s self-deprecating humor evolved into a kind of emotional survival tool. His sardonic musings are punctuated by quiet moments where the comedian sits, pauses, and lets silence say what words cannot.
For fans who have followed him for years, Are We Good? arrives not as a biography, but as an emotional reckoning, the sound of someone still trying to ask if work, laughter, and memory can coexist.
The Man Who Made Introspection Funny
There’s always been a paradox within Marc Maron’s comedy: the more painfully honest he becomes, the funnier he gets. His stand-up routines have often taken the shape of personal essays dressed as confessionals, with bits about neurosis, addiction, resentment, and spiritual weariness forming their own rhythm.
Feinartz’s camera catches that rhythm in motion, allowing us to see where Maron’s jokes come from and why they matter.
Early sections of the film retrace his beginnings in New Mexico, his time at Boston University, and the fiery period of stand-up experimentation that helped birth the alt-comedy scene in New York and Los Angeles. These years were shaped by a blend of insecurity and creative ferocity.
Colleagues like John Mulaney, David Cross, W. Kamau Bell, and Caroline Rhea appear to speak of a man they admire but often struggle to understand. Their honesty gives the documentary the same reflective tone that defines Maron himself: funny, flawed, and far from perfect.
Feinartz refuses the temptation to tidy up Maron’s story. He confronts its chaos head-on. The film includes candid admissions of cocaine use, failed relationships, and constant bouts of anger. Rather than soften these truths, Feinartz uses them to trace Maron’s recurring theme, the desire to connect despite self-inflicted isolation.
Even when joking about the absurdity of making a documentary about himself, Maron can’t quite hide the discomfort of being studied. He jokes about whether Feinartz plans to animate podcast segments, poking fun at cliché biographical filmmaking.
The solution is witty and simple: a black screen with audio waves and Maron’s voice, pure and unadorned. For a performer whose career revolves around speaking, it feels right.
These choices reinforce an idea that runs through everything Maron does, the idea that truth is best found in imperfection.
Whether laughing about human anxiety or grieving over a lost love, he keeps the audience within touching distance of raw emotion. His persona, equal parts philosopher and pessimist, proves that comedy doesn’t have to be comforting to be meaningful.
Lynn Shelton: Love, Loss, and the Shadow That Remained
The tenderness at the center of Are We Good? lies in its depiction of Lynn Shelton. For viewers who knew Maron mainly through his comic rage and intellectual bravado, his love for Shelton reveals something softer, almost sacred.
Are we good? (Credit: Radiant Media Studios)
Their relationship began professionally when she directed him in Sword of Trust and deepened during their time together on Netflix’s G.L.O.W. Offscreen, their partnership became a genuine refuge from the chaos of Maron’s past.
Her sudden death from an illness in 2020 changed him profoundly. The film revisits the moment through audio pulled from the WTF episode where he announced her passing. His words, “I loved her, and she loved me, and I knew that,” form the emotional centerpiece of Feinartz’s documentary.
Actor Michaela Watkins, a close friend of both, describes Shelton’s affection for Maron’s “pugnaciousness,” a term that defines his artistic energy as much as his personality.
Feinartz portrays not just grief, but how grief reshapes creation. Maron’s later comedy reflects the ache of losing someone who balanced him, who made him feel seen.
On stage, he admits to audiences that handling loss is a nightmare without instruction. It hurts publicly and privately, and yet, he keeps performing. “There’s no one way to do it,” he says with a tired honesty that turns confession into art.
In these scenes, Are We Good? becomes more than a portrait of a comedian; it’s a study of what art means after heartbreak. Maron’s humor does not erase pain; it tries to coexist with it. Beneath the laughter lies the struggle to keep speaking, keep reaching, keep being the version of himself that Lynn believed in.
The Documentary as a Mirror of Vulnerability
What makes Are We Good? Unique among modern documentary portraits is its refusal to glorify its subject. Feinartz’s camera does not search for redemption; it simply observes. Maron’s self-awareness drives the story forward as much as his grief does.
He openly mocks the very process of self-mythologizing, worrying aloud that this film will “ruin” him. Instead, it humanizes him.
From his erratic beginnings to his steady rise as a cultural figure, Maron’s trajectory mirrors the evolution of the comedy industry. His podcast started before anyone had declared podcasting the new arena of intimacy, and now he stands as one of its elder statesmen.
Each conversation, whether humorous or haunting, has served as therapy not just for Maron but for an audience that sees parts of itself in his confessions.
Feinartz ties this legacy beautifully to Maron’s ongoing grief. The film’s rhythm alternates between sadness and humor, never forcing comfort where none exists.
It insists that vulnerability and art will always be bound together. Maron may doubt the process of healing, but through every frame, he shows that expression is a form of endurance.
A Funny Man Facing the Quiet
Viewed through the lens of 2025, Are We Good? feels timeless. It speaks to how creative people continue even when cracked open by loss. Maron, now past 60, still confronts life with a mix of sarcasm and sincerity. He hasn’t softened entirely; he has simply matured into a kind of restless peace.
Feinartz’s documentary gives that evolution its most poignant form: not a career retrospective, but a meditation on what it means to keep moving. It captures humor as an act of love, sorrow as an act of clarity, and storytelling as a way to remain alive.
Marc Maron may never find an answer to his question Are we good? But through his words, laughs, and pauses, he reminds audiences that asking might just be enough.
