Lycan subscribe to my review of King’s werewolf campfire tale.
Silver Bullet, to date, remains Stephen King’s one and only foray into the werewolf myth, at least the werewolf orthodoxy and that it does so without irony or apology is quite refreshing. There’s something deeply earnest in its construction; not naïvety exactly, but a confidence in the appeal of a small-town morality play that it doesn’t feel the need to add to the lore. Marrying King’s signature elements – the intimate voiceover of a childhood remembered, a sleepy New England town ripe for disruption, the strained sanctity of family, and a precocious child with wheels that matter – to a werewolf story that embraces tradition without succumbing to Gothic melodrama or creature-feature excess, Silver Bullet ends up celebrating the genre rather than the trendier approach of trying to redefine it.
Adapted from King’s own novella Cycle of the Werewolf, the film walks a curious tightrope between the episodic structure of the source and the more conventional narrative needs of a feature film. Each chapter was tied to the monthly calendar, each month a new killing, loosely but increasingly linked until the final confrontation. The seasonal progression is preserved in the film with title cards that march through the months, giving the feel of an anthology that builds in each successive instalment. It’s a surprisingly elegant device for pacing dread, especially given how compact the narrative otherwise is. This isn’t a mystery that twists and coils; it’s a slow encroachment, dread by degrees, with the true identity of the werewolf being less a shocking reveal than an earned confirmation. In some ways it parallels the slow corruption from within that King previously explored in Salem’s Lot.
The screenplay, penned by King himself, strips the elements back to the story’s core: wheelchair-bound Marty Coslaw (Corey Haim), his supportive but sceptical sister Jane (Megan Follows), and his lovable deadbeat uncle Red (Gary Busey, dialled in marvellously just shy of chaos). What might have been a rote trio in other hands is saved by King’s affection for dysfunction and director Daniel Attias’ willingness to let the characters breathe. Busey, in particular, does wonders in a role that could so easily have tipped into buffoonery and bluster but Red becomes the film’s unexpected soul; unreliable? Yes. Exasperating? Often, but ultimately steadfast, his bond with Marty anchored in a kind of reckless loyalty that feels utterly lived in.
Corey Haim’s Marty is perhaps the closest the film comes to mythologising its protagonist, a boy rendered dependent by his disability but never diminished by it and King (and the film) refuses to indulge in sentimentality about his condition, one of Silver Bullet’s quietest but most admirable achievements. His souped-up wheelchair, one of the silver bullets that give the film its title, feels halfway between E.T.’s mythologised BMX and a Mad Max wasteland raider. Bicycles in King’s works are rarely just bikes: they’re talismans of freedom, catalysts of adventure, and often the only means of escape when the adult world has either abandoned you or simply can’t cope. Marty’s Silver Bullet is a pimped-out update of Bill Denbrough’s trusty Silver from It, and in giving his protagonist wheels that roar instead of whir, the film supercharges the motif without losing its emotional charge.
What gives the film lasting charm, however, isn’t just the character work or the calendar pacing, but its unwavering commitment to telling a werewolf story in the old-fashioned way, like it’s a ghost story told over a campfire. There are moments of gore, of course – the baseball bat murder, the decapitations, the climactic confrontation – but they’re rarely gratuitous. Carlo Rambaldi’s werewolf design might be a little contentious, but it works in the world of the film. There’s nothing mythical about the way it looks; it’s no cursed nobleman or tortured soul. It’s a brute predator in sheepdog’s clothing, hiding in plain sight as a man of the cloth. The choice to make the werewolf a preacher (Everett McGill, playing it tight-lipped and mournful) gives the film a cynical smirk but doesn’t labour the irony.
The film remains faithful to the novella in spirit, even where it condenses or reorders the details with King’s screenplay reshaping the inner monologue driven tale into something more cinematic without losing its texture. It’s sentimental without being maudlin, and self-aware without tipping into being snide and embraces its werewolf core with enthusiasm, unapologetically a monster movie.
Silver Bullet is a fireside fable about the monster behind the sermon, the beast lurking behind the eyes of a neighbour and a town’s refusal to act until it’s too late. And for all its conventional tropes, Silver Bullet remains an underrated gem in the firmament of Stephen King adaptations.
