Salem’s Lot was Filmed Outside our House! 10/2021

In October 2021, a production crew came to Ipswich to film the newest adaptation of Salem’s Lot / Jerusalem’s Lot, a story by Stephen King about vampires.  The majority of filming took place on our little section of South Main Street!  It was so cool to watch.  I heard Stephen King made an appearance in town, but we didn’t see him 😥.  The movie was set to release in September 2022, but hasn’t been released yet, and might not ever be 😥😥.

Our house apparently wasn’t in most shots, so we were allowed to stand on the sidewalk at the end of our driveway, along with a bunch of people who came to watch the filming.  Every now and then they’d shoo us back away from the street.  You can see a black old-timey car to the left which had just driven past our house, and a row of cars on the right waiting for their cue:

       

The nighttime filming was the best.  They had smoke machines and green lighting which made everything look so spooky:

       

They even rented our driveway to lay down their fabric smoke machine pipes and generators!  We made $750 [the other 2 condos in our house got paid too] & didn’t even have to move our cars!:

       

View from our deck, at the back of the house, looking towards the road and the smoke machine pipe running through our driveway:

       

The River looked so cool during filming, all green and misty and spooky:

       

At one point they brought in a huge light on a crane that hung over everything:

       

They were using it to film the “vampires” on the roof of the Ipswich Visitor’s Center.  The film crew/production crew didn’t want anyone taking photos… so I went back inside and snuck these pics from our bedroom window:

       

They were also using lights that looked like fire, and there were production crew on top of a house 2 down from ours [took these pics from across the River]:

       

A few weeks before filming, crews came to transform our street.  All the shops were turned into old-timey shops – it was so cool to walk up and down the street and look in the windows and at the signs:

       

Old-timey TVs and products:

       

They turned our former courthouse-now-condos into a Town Hall with a sign on the lawn, and made the Ipswich Visitor’s Center [diagonally across from our house] into a bus stop & The Cumberland Ledger newspapery:

       

If you’re familiar with Stephen King’s work, you’ll know that his BIGGEST BADDIE, who shows up in numerous stories, including THE STAND, is Randall Flagg.  They turned Cummings Architecture next door to us into “Flagg Certified Public Accountant & Notary” and the Police Station nearby got a Jerusalem’s Lot sign [and some scuffing up, unless our Police Station always looks like that…]:

       

They also painted Cummings Architecture a cool orange/yellow color with green shutters.  It used to be grey.  They painted most of the buildings on our street, in addition to adding the old-timey signs and products.  The gas station was hilarious – the story takes place in the 1970s when gas was apparently 53¢ / gallon:

They also added a stop light at the nearby intersection and also built a fence where there’s normally a view of the River:

       

The parking lot of Ebsco Publishing [across the River from us] housed all the old-timey cars when they weren’t filming:

       

A super cool panoramic my phone made for me, of the River and the dam and Ebsco Publishing and the Riverwalk Bridge all lit up with the eerie green lighting from the filming:

I hope they do release the movie someday, so we can see our street on the big screen!