IIt’s a genius, shape-shifting creature, the vampire movie; a genre that lends itself to layers of symbolism and subtext. Out of The dusk sagaThe syrupy themes from youthful romantic longing to the agonizing loneliness of a bullied child Let the right person in and the revisionist political history and absurdity of El Conde – starring an undead incarnation of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet – the vampire film is rarely just about vampires.

For this reason, Gary Dauberman’s film adaptation of Salem’s propertybased on Stephen King’s 1975 novel, which spawned two TV miniseries and plenty of pop culture references, feels almost radical in its complete lack of ambition, scope and depth. It’s an old-fashioned story about an epidemic of the undead in a small town in rural Maine. And that’s it. No underlying meaning, no tricky issues to resolve. For viewers who expect a little more intellectual bite from their vampire films, this is pale, bloodless stuff.

Two newcomers shake up the sleepy town of Salem’s Lot. Author Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman), tied to the community through a childhood tragedy, has returned to research his next project. And antique shop owner RT Straker (Pilou Asbaek) is a new immigrant to the United States (from an earlier century, judging by his ties and snappy acting style). Straker has a smile that could peel off furniture polish and an accent that sounds like it was dug up from a Central European plague pit. But when children disappear, it’s Mears who bears the brunt of the local hostility – his relationship with town sweetheart Susan (Makenzie Leigh) may be a factor.

The ’70s setting is a little too neat and antiseptic to be entirely convincing, but the main problem is a clumsy script that laboriously over-explains while simultaneously feeling as if key plot points were lost along the way. The vampire genre, like its snarling protagonists, is notoriously difficult to completely kill, but this shallow and uninspired film could be a nail in the coffin.