INTRO: Written by master of literary horror Stephen King, Silver Bullet is about a werewolf terrorizing a small town in Maine. The only people who can stop it are an ad-libbing Gary Busey, playing an unruly uncle. And two kids: a teen girl, and her paraplegic little brother, who is played by Corey Haim and gets around in a souped-up, gas-powered wheelchair. The movie is just as cool as it sounds, and not only deserves to be ranked highly as one of the best werewolf movies ever made. It might also be the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: It all started when Christopher Zavista of Land of Enchantment Press had the clever idea to pair the artwork of Bernie Wrightson with the words of Stephen King for a calendar project. King would write a short story that would be separated into twelve vignettes, one for every month. And Wrightson would provide the art that would accompany each month’s vignette. Tasked with writing something that would play out over twelve months, King decided to build the story around the lunar cycle. Each vignette would be about a werewolf terrorizing the small town of Tarker’s Mills, Maine during the monthly full moon. Then he took liberties with the lunar cycle so the werewolf attacks could take place on certain holidays. Valentine’s Day, Independence Day, New Year’s Eve.
King said the idea appealed to him because, “Here we can have twenty-three new and interesting murders, sort of like Friday the 13th.” But he didn’t just want to write a series of murder scenes, or as he called it, “Snuff stuff: set ‘em up and knock ‘em down like dominoes.” He wanted the murders to have an interesting story happening around them. And once he figured out the story and characters, he ran into another problem. He found it difficult to write something short enough to fit on a calendar page. So the story grew bigger, until Land of Enchantment had to change the plan. This wouldn’t be a calendar, it would be a novella, with Wrightson still on board to provide illustrations that would appear throughout the book.
With a page count of one hundred and twenty-seven, the King and Wrightson collaboration was published under the title Cycle of the Werewolf in November of 1983. The film rights were immediately snatched up by producer Dino De Laurentiis, who made several King adaptations over the years: The Dead Zone, Firestarter, Cat’s Eye, Sometimes They Come Back.
Retitled Silver Bullet, the adaptation of Cycle of the Werewolf passed through the hands of a few different writers. Then Stephen King ended up writing the screenplay himself. Daniel Attias, who had previously worked as a second assistant director on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Twilight Zone: The Movie, was given the opportunity to make his directorial debut with this project.
Silver Bullet is very simple, as you would expect from something that originated as an idea for a calendar. People are being killed in Tarker’s Mills, their bodies left a mangled mess. The town’s residents are terrified, and the local authorities – led by Terry O’Quinn as Sheriff Haller – don’t know how to handle the situation. The first person to suspect the killer is a werewolf and not your average homicidal maniac is a young boy named Marty Coslaw. Played by Corey Haim. At first, Marty is the only one who believes a werewolf is to blame. But soon he’s able to convince his sister Jane, played by Megan Follows. And eventually their alcoholic Uncle Red, played by Gary Busey, is pulled into the werewolf insanity as well. By the time Uncle Red gets involved, Marty and Jane even know who the werewolf is. That’s because Marty was attacked by the werewolf while setting off fireworks, and managed to blast out one of the creature’s eyes with a bottle rocket. The Tarker’s Mills resident who starts wearing an eyepatch after that incident is Reverend Lowe, played by Everett McGill. And yes, when the werewolf is on screen, that was also McGill inside the costume.
The story of the film is being told to the audience by an older Jane, with Tovah Feldshuh providing a voiceover narration that feels largely unnecessary. Because of this storytelling decision, the film takes place nine years before its 1985 release… But there’s no evidence on screen that there was any attempt to make the movie look like it was set in 1976. Vehicles as recent as 1983 models can be spotted in the background. The ‘76 setting wasn’t specified in King’s screenplay and comes off like a questionable choice made in post-production.
BACKGROUND: Daniel Attias wasn’t the first director considered for Silver Bullet. The first filmmaker Dino De Laurentiis approached about bringing King’s story to the screen was Phantasm director Don Coscarelli. The producer had been impressed by Coscarelli’s work on The Beastmaster, and originally got in contact with him to offer him the chance to direct Conan the Destroyer. When Coscarelli turned that one down, De Laurentiis offered him Silver Bullet instead. A Stephen King werewolf movie was an offer Coscarelli couldn’t refuse. He took the job. A draft of the script had already been written at that point, but De Laurentiis wasn’t happy with it. Coscarelli would have to rework it, and De Laurentiis wanted him to write it with Sergio Altieri. Altieri would go on to earn a lot of writing credits, but he wasn’t known as a writer at that time. He worked for the producer as a translator, taking English documents and translating them into De Laurentiis’s first language, Italian. Coscarelli went along with the idea of writing the script with Altieri anyway. They decided to keep the monthly format of King’s story and divided up the sections: Coscarelli would write one month, Altieri would write another month, and so on. When Coscarelli and Altieri turned in their script, they ran into trouble. De Laurentiis didn’t like it, and wanted to get rid of the monthly structure. Cycle of the Werewolf played out over a year, but Silver Bullet was going to have a condensed time frame.
This is when De Laurentiis asked King to write the screenplay himself. But King declined because he was too busy. Instead of writing the script, King said he would look at the Coscarelli and Altieri draft and give them notes on how to improve it. Coscarelli knew the script wasn’t in perfect shape, so he welcomed King’s opinion… and when King sent in his notes on the script, Coscarelli was very happy. As far as he was concerned, King had found a way to solve all of the script’s problems. De Laurentiis didn’t agree. During an interview on the KingCast podcast, Coscarelli said the producer gave King’s notes a quick look, without even asking Altieri to translate them for him, and then tossed them in the trash. In that moment, Coscarelli realized making Silver Bullet wasn’t going to be a good experience for him. So he left the project.
De Laurentiis was able to convince King to write the script after Coscarelli dropped out. And Daniel Attias caught the producer’s attention because his agent specialized in representing young talent who could be hired for lower costs. Attias was brought in for a meeting, impressed De Laurentiis with his Silver Bullet pitch, and got the job. All these decades later, Silver Bullet remains the only feature film Attias has ever directed. But the director has been working steadily ever since. His focus has just been on television instead of films, and in the world of TV he has racked up nearly one hundred directing credits. Which is why he was qualified to write a book called Directing Great Television.
The script wasn’t the only issue De Laurentiis had with Coscarelli’s approach to the adaptation. The producer was also unhappy with how Coscarelli wanted to handle the werewolf sequences. Knowing how difficult it was to make werewolf effects look convincing, Coscarelli wanted to shoot the attacks like the shark attack scenes in Jaws. The werewolf would be kept off screen as much as possible, and the reveal of the creature would be saved for late in the running time. De Laurentiis objected. The werewolf effects were being done by Carlo Rambaldi, an Oscar winner for his work on King Kong 1976, Alien, and E.T. He wanted to show this thing off and give the full reveal right in the opening attack scene. But it’s worth noting that De Laurentiis did not get what he wanted in the finished film. The werewolf attacks are shot just like Coscarelli suggested they should be. The creature is kept off screen or obscured for most of the movie. We get our best look at it in the climactic scene. And when we do see the full reveal, it’s not exactly mind-blowing. Because werewolves are very difficult creatures to bring to life on screen.
It’s not surprising that Attias took the Jaws approach to Silver Bullet, since he had worked with Steven Spielberg. While making decisions on the set of the film, he would sometimes even ask himself, “What would Spielberg do?” He also tried to keep the werewolf hidden because he wasn’t impressed by Rambaldi’s design. It didn’t have many animatronics in the face to create expressions, and Attias thought it looked more like a bear than a werewolf.
Another challenge Attias faced is the fact that the cinematographer De Laurentiis hired was Armando Nannuzzi, an Italian who didn’t speak a word of English. Attias didn’t speak any Italian. But he and Nannuzzi did both speak a little French, so they were able to communicate in that language. It all worked out in the long run, and Silver Bullet turned out to be a good looking movie. Nannuzzi was also the cinematographer on the next King adaptation De Laurentiis produced, Maximum Overdrive. A film that was directed by King himself. The cinematographer lost an eye in an accident on the set of that film, but he didn’t let that stop him from continuing to do his job.
The climax of Silver Bullet takes place on Halloween night, so the film was given an appropriate release date of October 11th in 1985. The reviews weren’t very positive, but it did well enough at the box office. Made on a budget of seven million dollars, it ended up earning just over twelve million before heading to home video. The movie has had a solid cult following ever since it was first released, but still doesn’t seem to receive as much positive attention as it should. It may not feature one of the coolest werewolves you’ve ever seen, but it is an excellent werewolf story nonetheless. And deserves to be recognized as one of the best werewolf movies we’ve ever gotten.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: If you want werewolf action, Silver Bullet has plenty of it. The first half of the film is packed with werewolf attack sequences, separated by short scenes that establish the lead characters. And show how the mysterious murder spree is affecting the townspeople. While trying to figure out how to fill the movie with werewolf attacks without showing too much of the werewolf, Coscarelli came up with a cool idea. A sequence that would show people getting picked off by the werewolf while it’s hiding within a thick ground fog. You know it was a cool idea because that sequence is still in the movie, despite the fact that it wasn’t written or directed by Coscarelli.
Once the film is past the halfway point, it shifts gears. Werewolf moments come less frequently. Around this time, Marty’s werewolf suspicions are confirmed. And from then on, the movie is about Marty, Jane, and Uncle Red taking it upon themselves to end this monstrous threat. It still works because these are good characters and we want to see how this trio is going to manage to take out a werewolf. There’s also great cat and mouse tension in the second half, because Reverend Lowe is aware that Marty is suspicious of him. This allows for a very unique scene in which Lowe tries to run Marty down in his car. While Marty is driving the souped-up wheelchair Uncle Red made for him. A wheelchair that’s called Silver Bullet and can go as fast as any other vehicle on the road. There aren’t many movies that feature vehicular chases involving wheelchairs. And you definitely don’t expect to see that sort of thing in a werewolf movie.
There are times when Silver Bullet feels like a movie that’s in conflict with itself. Attias wanted it to be a PG-13 adventure that kids could go see. There are times when the score composed by Jay Chattaway and the voiceover narration play into that. But De Laurentiis wanted this to be bloody and R-rated, so he kept making a reluctant Attias add in gore. The resulting film is a mixture of bloodshed that will satisfy adult horror fans. And scenes like Marty’s wheelchair races, which will be more appealing to younger viewers. So while Silver Bullet is a good gateway horror movie for monster kids, it probably shouldn’t be their first werewolf movie because of the intensity of the attack scenes. Save this one for after they’ve seen The Monster Squad.
King didn’t tell exactly how Lowe became a werewolf in Cycle of the Werewolf, and that information isn’t in Silver Bullet, either. Attias has his own theory, though – and it really shows how deeply he cared for and understood the characters. During an interview on the Portalville podcast, Attias said he saw Silver Bullet as a film that’s about disabilities and how people deal with them. Marty has the most obvious disability, but other characters have them as well. And Attias figured that, “You become a monster if you can’t accept your own wounds. If you can’t really look at your imperfections or the things that give you pain. If you deny them, it comes back in much fuller force. So I started to think of the Reverend as a character who had this view of himself where he had to be puritanically perfect. He’s deeply repressed, and then he becomes a monster. And then I thought Uncle Red has his own disability, he can’t face his life, he can’t face that he’s an alcoholic. He’s also avoiding his world. Marty is the hero because he’s the only one who accepts it. He says, ‘Okay, this is the hand I got dealt. I’m not going to deny it.’ And therefore he has access to greater knowledge and greater understanding of those who have been denying it.”
BEST SCENE(S): Attias’s read on the material is clear in a scene where we see Marty experiencing a rare moment of depression. Watching other kids play baseball, he’s feeling sad that he can’t join in. Because he’s distracted by this, he doesn’t notice that Lowe is stalking him… And that leads into the car chase.
Some of the best scenes in the movie are the ones involving Uncle Red. Which are especially entertaining because Gary Busey was allowed to improvise some of his lines. Uncle Red often comes off as comic relief, but he has some strong dramatic moments as well. And his most dramatic scene was added by Attias, who let Busey and Robin Groves, who plays Red’s sister Nan – the mother of Marty and Jane – improv their way through a serious discussion between siblings. Red disagrees with the way Nan treats Marty and handles his disability. Nan feels Red’s poor decisions in life are a bad influence on Marty. It’s a terrific scene that shows Silver Bullet had more on its mind than just werewolf action and gore.
Of course, when it is focusing on werewolf action and gore, that’s really awesome too.
PARTING SHOT: King has said Silver Bullet is probably the only movie ever made to be based on an idea that was originally only supposed to be a calendar. Chances are he’s right about that. But it’s interesting to see how good a movie based on a calendar idea can turn out to be. Silver Bullet doesn’t have the best looking werewolf, but that dodgy looking werewolf is at the center of some very memorable moments. And when the werewolf isn’t on its rampage, we get to spend time with interesting characters perfectly brought to life by the film’s cast.
Some odd choices were made along the way, but for the most part Daniel Attias delivered a very solid horror movie with his directorial debut. It’s enough to make you wish that he had made more features over the years. Especially more horror features. But if this is the only movie Attias ever makes, at least he gave us one of the all-time best werewolf movies before he went over to television. A great Stephen King movie that still holds up decades later.
A couple previous episodes of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series can be seen below. To see more, and to check out some of our other shows, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!
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