The Story Behind One of the Creepiest Scenes in TV History - Vanity Fair

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The floating boys of 1979’s Salem’s Lot still haunt us. Now the actors share the simple tricks that made it so terrifying.

By Anthony Breznican

October 31, 2022

A young boy with an unnaturally pallid face hovers in the mist outside his big brother’s window. The lurid smile is chilling. But then the scratching—oh, God, the scratching—on the glass makes it unbearable.

This moment from 1979’s two-part TV movie Salem's Lot remains one of the most unnerving to ever hit the airwaves. Movies based on the books of Stephen King have been scaring audiences for decades, but Salem’s Lot was one of the very first (only Carrie from 1976 came before it) and it still harbors vivid moments of terror that endure 43 years later. Its influence has been felt in everything from The Lost Boys to Midnight Mass, and the window sequence was even famously spoofed on The Simpsons. Eminem gave it a shout-out in “Lose Yourself” (“I cannot grow old in Salem’s Lot…”) as a reference to a home that drains your life away, vampiric intrusions or no.

The bedroom window sequence is notable because it features not a drop of blood, and not a single word of dialogue. Some of the subconscious filmmaking techniques at play burrow under the skin in deceptive ways, as the actors will explain. But really, it’s just about a lost little boy, finding his way home to his big brother. Can’t he come in, please?

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What’s behind the strange expression—part glee, part agony—on the undead child’s face? Ron Scribner, now 56, who played the boy in the window, explains it this way to Vanity Fair: “It was probably the pain from the contact lenses digging into my eyeballs.”

“One of them rolled into the back of my eyes and the on-set doctor had to not sedate me, but relax me to where they could roll and massage the contact lens back into the front of my eye,” he says. “It was incredibly uncomfortable to wear that. It caused a lot of pain and I couldn’t see worth a darn for hours. I didn’t like wearing those. The teeth, that was fine, no problem there. Kind of like any set of teeth you buy for a couple of dollars, and stick them in there.”

“Go for the Jugular”

Brad Savage, also 56, played the big brother in this scene, remembered the discomfort of the vampire eyes as well. But otherwise, both said the making of Salem’s Lot was a scary-good time. “Like camp,” says Savage, who credits King with breaking some of the taboos of horror with this story line, allowing children to actually turn into the monsters rather than just cower in fear from them.

“That’s one of the really innovative, interesting takes that he brought to the vampire lore, having kids involved,” Savage says. “I love that. God bless him, you know? Just go for the jugular, as they say.”

The novel is about a community that gradually becomes overtaken by creatures of the night, with strange omens and disappearances happening just below the surface of their quiet small town, just like all the other scandals, crimes, and gossip. The CBS movie, had a heavy-hitting cast, with David Soul (then the star of Starsky and Hutch), three-time Oscar nominee James Mason, Bonnie Bedelia (later the perpetually endangered wife in the Die Hard movies) and even the late comic actor Fred Willard as a sleazy real estate agent who meets a particularly lurid end.

Salem’s Lot was directed by the late Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist filmmaker Tobe Hooper, who maintained the Our Town meets Nosferatu vibe by emphasizing moments that were quietly disturbing over jump scares or gore.

When Hooper died in 2017, Guardians of the Galaxy and Slither director James Gunn wrote that Hooper had “created the moment that scared me the most as a child—that floating, dead kid tapping on the window.”

The First Window

Scribner had just turned 13 when he played the first of the victims, a boy named Ralphie Glick, who vanishes in the woods after the arrival of a strange man (James Mason) who moves to the town with a crate carrying an ancient monster within. Their intention is to turn the remote village into a new hive. Ralphie is the first to be taken.

The oblivious townsfolk beat the bushes looking for the lost child, but Ralphie is not coming back—except for in the spectral form that appears one night outside his brother Danny’s bedroom.

“To this day, nobody has been able to decipher the issue of why was I running through the woods with a windbreaker and jeans and a shirt on, but when I was a vampire, I was in my pajamas,” Scribner says. “Nobody knows the answer to that, including me.”

The floating effect was created not with wires, but by creating a body suit that attached to a crane behind him.

Savage played the older brother. He recalls Hooper arranged a special screening of a 1972 movie called The Other, based on a Thomas Tryon novel about a pair of twins who share a creepy bond. “He had Ron and I go watch the screening before we did the movie,” he says. “Basically the way that [the twins] communicated was this kind of weird, telepathic way, like they’re under a spell, basically. As I recall, that was the direction: to play them like they were just in this deep kind of headspace.”

Bev Vincent, a longtime King scholar and author of the new book The Stephen King Ultimate Companion, notes that King was already established as a best-selling author by 1979, having published The Shining, The Stand, and The Dead Zone. But the two-part CBS film raised his profile in Hollywood, where adaptations would proliferate in the decades to come, and it made everyone talk about him at the same time.

“Television was such an event-oriented thing at the time. If you didn’t see it when it happened, there was no going back,” Vincent says. “It aired in November, just post-Halloween, and I think that probably everybody was watching it at the same time. So around the water cooler at work the next day, or in the cafeteria at school the next day, you had to be talking about it.”

Vincent vividly remembers seeing it himself. “Man, oh man, the creepiness factor of so many different parts of that series…” he says. “Definitely everybody always remembers [the window] because he's just floating. They’re clearly on the second floor, so you know something is not right there.” Artists are still making fan art of that scene, or recording YouTube reaction videos.

A big part of the effect is also deceptively simple: a lot of it was played backwards, lending an added air of creepy unreality to the scene.

“I don’t think that’s a fact that’s very well known,” Vincent says.

The Second Visit

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In Salem’s Lot, vampires tend not to finish their meals in one sitting. They always come back for seconds. So Scribner and Savage had one more scene where the older brother, anemic from the inexplicable loss of blood, is still alive but confined to a hospital.

His little brother still finds him. And he wants to come in again, of course.

Savage points out that he and Scribner performed the window scene in reverse. If you look closely at the hospital scene above, note the way the smoke and mist retreat backward, becoming more dense and ribbon-like instead of flowing out and dissipating.

“I remember we did the bite shots backwards. So you’d start with with the fangs in the neck and then he’d pull back and then float around a little bit,” Savage says. “Then they played it in reverse.” The result antagonizes the viewer’s sense of perception in ways that might not be immediately obvious.

“It’s just interesting that from a production point of view, that they would come up with an idea like that,” Vincent says. “Nowadays it would be trivial and it would be all CGI. But when they do things backwards, there’s a certain creepiness. There’s a stiltedness, an unnaturalness to the way things are moving.”

“Even the scratching was done backwards,” Scribner adds. “So I put my hands, my fingernails, on the window and then lift them up. It was an unnatural move for me, and Tobe Hooper guided me every single step of the way. I mean he just gave me direction. He would do what he wanted and then ask me to repeat it, then he would look at it and give his approval or, ‘Hey, let’s try it again. Let’s try it a different way. Go slower.’”

“He was the circus master, the maestro,” Scribner says.

In the Graveyard

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Spoiler warning, in case you couldn’t guess: Danny doesn’t survive his little brother’s second visit. The devastated Glick parents must mourn the loss of another child (but don’t worry, they’ll all be reunited soon).

Before he can muster the strength to float outside his own friends’ windows, Danny must replenish his energy, starting with the blood of Mike Ryerson, the local handyman and gravedigger. “My most memorable moment was after my funeral,” Savage recalls. “Honestly, out of my whole childhood career, that was the creepiest experience. They literally put me in a coffin and lowered me down 8, 10 feet into a hole.”

Then had to wait, enclosed in the darkness, while Ryerson (played by the late Geoffrey Lewis) responded to the whispers he thinks he hears coming from within. Although Lewis, the father of actor Juliette Lewis, was known for playing weirdos, villains, and lowlifes, Savage remembered him differently. “Geoffrey Lewis was the nicest, sweetest man. I mean, what great memories I have of him. He was so kind and, and just a real pro.”

They have a truly horrific scene together, which was slightly alarming for Savage in real life. “He throws a couple of shovelfuls of dirt onto the coffin, which I heard, you know. You}ve got your fangs in, and your [yellow] eyes on, and you’re in your little burial suit.” He laughs: “That was probably the most damage done to my psyche.”

Then Lewis leaps onto the coffin and tears it open, and the vampire boy inside comes alive to feast.

“Look at Me, Teacher…”

While most people say the boy at the window is the scariest scene in Salem’s Lot, the actor playing the spectral boy himself gives that distinction to a different scene, one that comes after the gravedigger is turned—and returns to feast himself.

“Geoffrey Lewis’s scene to me was the scariest one in the movie, where he is just sitting in the rocking chair with those eyes,” Scribner says. “That’s the scariest scene in the entire movie to me.”

Lewis’s character visits a local high school teacher who was kind to him during life, allowing the down-on-his-luck laborer to stay at his home. “Look at me, teacher…” the vampire version of Ryerson whispers. “Look at me…”

Even as a viewer, all these years later, it’s impossible to look away.

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The Final Window Visit

Why would anyone allow any of these beings inside? Great question—and not everybody in Salem’s Lot succumbs to the spell.

A third boy, a friend of the Glick brothers named Mark Petrie (Lance Kerwin) is a lover of horror stories. His parents think he loves them too much, but the stories that they fear are rotting his brain ultimately end up saving his ass.

When Danny Glick comes tap-tap-tapping on Petrie’s window, the boy is clever enough to reach for a cross (in a nearby graveyard diorama, no less) to repel his undead friend.

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Similar reversal footage is used here, but there’s one key difference. Danny Glick doesn’t float around as eerily as his little brother. There’s a practical explanation for that—the crane malfunctioned.

“The day that we shot my windows, that unit broke so they put a black cover over a camera dolly that pushes up and down on a hydraulic. So, literally, I sat on that and they just went up and down and pulled it back and forth.”

King's Reaction

Back in 1979, King applauded the show, apart from some light casting quarrels, and even rented out a whole tavern to watch the telecast with his friends. He admitted he initially had low expectations, since broadcast TV in those days tended to tone things down.

“Considering the medium, they did a real good job. TV is death to horror. When it went to TV, a lot of people moaned and I was one of the moaners," he told the Bangor Daily News.

The Salem’s Lot two-part television movie also dropped the apostrophe from the title, avoiding the explanation that this is the shortened nickname locals have given the Biblical-sounding town of Jerusalem’s Lot. Today, the series—which can be streamed on Shudder—maintains an eerie and atmospheric feeling, despite the shaggy haircuts and wide-collared fashions of the disco-era production. When Hooper died five years ago, King again sang his praises.

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He had good reason to be satisfied. The 1979 version was remarkably faithful to his text. Consider this passage, describing Danny Glick’s appearance outside the window of his friend Mark Petrie:

“Something had awakened him. He lay still in the ticking dark, looking at the ceiling. A noise. Some noise. But the house was silent. There it was again. Scratching.

Mark Petrie turned over in bed and looked through the window and Danny Glick was staring in at him through the glass, his skin grave-pale, his eyes reddish and feral…. There was nothing for that hideous entity outside the window to hold on to; his room was on the second floor and there was no ledge. Yet somehow it hung suspected in space…”

The Aftermath

Savage, who went on to work in postproduction in Hollywood and helps run the production company Bandwagon Media, still appears at fan conventions to talk about the role. Scribner, who went on to work in banking, avoids the fan circuit but did visit the Northern California town where they shot it, Ferndale, for a 40th-anniversary screening. The vampire movie was—ironically—used to raise money for a local church.

“They had a really large turnout,” Scribner says. “Some great people were there, some huge fans. I got to see my character tattooed on a couple of people’s arms which was interesting. I’m not used to seeing a likeness or an image of myself on somebody’s body.”

He credits the movie with helping him meet his girlfriend of eight years. “We met on Match.com and, prior to meeting we didn’t know each other’s names. When you’re on social media like that, you use screen names.” They got to talking about movies, and talk turned to Salem’s Lot, which she loved. “I’m sitting there on the other end of the computer thinking to myself, I’ve got this one in the bag!” he recalls. “All I’ve got to do is have her Google my name. I don’t know if she believed me or not.”

The Remakes

The novel is being adapted again, this time with It and It: Chapter 2 screenwriter Gary Dauberman as the writer-director. Nothing has been released publicly about that version, and it could well go the way of the It movies, earning equal affection in the pop-culture consciousness as its TV predecessor.

But Salem’s Lot was remade once already, and the 2004 TNT version starring Rob Lowe in the David Soul role is, to put it kindly, not especially memorable. “The stuff that they did with the story, it just didn’t make any sense,” Vincent says. “I expunged most of it from my memory.”

Consider the 2004 version of the window scene:

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“It really says a lot that that scene from the ’79 series has persisted,” Vincent says. “That one is just emblazoned on people's memories. It's almost like it's traumatized people.”

Or, as King himself put it in his Bangor Daily News interview way back when: “You can take Kool-Aid and pour in six gallons of water and it’s still red, but it’s not the same.”