Michael Moriarty plays an amoral anthropologist who has been lumbered with his dysfunctional adolescent son and who returns to Salem's Lot, the town of his birth, to find that it has been taken over by the undead. A few living people are kept around to provide blood for the vampires and to operate the gas station and shops in the daytime. Knowing of the anthropologist's refusal to moralise about other people's lifestyles (in the opening scene he is seen refusing to interfere in a human sacrifice and concerned only for the quality of the film he is shooting), the vampires employ him to write their story. As the vampires' evil nature becomes clear, the anthropologist is joined by a Nazi hunter (played by Samuel Fuller) who helps him save his son, and at the climax the master vampire is impaled on the American flag instead of the traditional stake. As the trio escapes Salem's Lot, the vampires are left in the sun to burn along with their homes.
Italiano
L'antropologo Joe Weber (Michael Moriarty) e suo figlio Jeremy (Ricky Addison Reed) si recano in un paesino sperduto chiamato Salem's lot, noto anche come Gerusalem's Lot, dove una sua zia gli aveva lasciato la casa. Una notte scopriranno che il paese è abitato solo da vampiri e da alcuni mortali che gli aiutano a procurarne vittime per cibarsene, capitanati dal giudice Axel (Andrew Duggan). Quando in paese arriva l'anziano cacciatore di vampiri Van Meer (Samuel Fuller) si allea con Joe per uccidere i vampiri ad uno ad uno.