Silver Bullet takes a bite out of the box office on October 11, 1985


The air's got that crisp bite to it now, doesn't it? The leaves are turning, a hint of woodsmoke is on the breeze, and the days are getting shorter, pulling the shadows longer behind them. It's the kind of season that feels right for a certain kind of story. The kind that makes you pull your collar a little tighter, maybe glance over your shoulder when you're walking home alone. The kind that makes you wonder what really goes bump in the night. And speaking of bumps, creaks, and things that go howl, today's the day. October 11. Just the kind of day that lulls you into forgetting the darkness that comes with October. And oh, boy, did the darkness come to Tarker's Mills, Maine.

The story of what stalked Tarker's Mills took celluloid form this day in 1985, with the release of the movie Silver Bullet, based on the 1983 Stephen King novella Cycle of the Werewolf. In Tarker's Mills, a series of brutal murders begins to tear the community apart. At first, they blame drifters, accidents, maybe even some sort of deranged human predator. 

But young Marty Coslaw, who uses wheels for legs, he sees things differently. Played by the late, great Corey Haim, he's got that spark, that leap of intuition, that connection to the deeper, darker currents running beneath the surface of things. And what Marty sees, or rather, what he suspects, is far more ancient, far more primal.

He suspects a werewolf.

His uncle, Red—brought to life by Gary Busey, who’s something of a werewolf himself—is a bit of a mess, a drunk with a heart of gold and a mouth that chews scenery by the hectare. Then there’s Jane, Marty’s sister, played by Megan Follows, who’s got her own kind of grit. They’re up against something that ain’t human, something that’s tearing Tarker’s Mills apart, one bloody corpse at a time. And nobody believes the kid in the wheelchair when he says he’s seen the monster—nobody but Red, and even he’s half-sure it’s the whiskey talking.

Now, nobody's going to confuse Silver Bullet with the greatest werewolf flicks ever made - all of which starred Lon Chaney Jr. as the titular canis lupus. Silver Bullet's visuals couldn't quite keep up with the ferocious pace set by the King book's illustrator, Bernie Wrightson. And the movie's budget was thinner than the novella itself.

But director Daniel Attias took King's story and gave it sharp enough claws for a Halloween season night at the movies. He didn’t shy away from the blood, but he didn’t lean on it either. This wasn’t about gore for gore’s sake—it was about fear. The kind of fear you feel when you’re alone in the dark, and you hear something growl just beyond the porchlight. The kind of fear that makes you wonder if the neighbor you’ve known all your life might have a secret he only lets out when the full moon’s high. When the beast’s eyes glow in the fog, or when Marty’s staring down the barrel of a nightmare in the dead of night, you feel it. 

Silver Bullet is about more than just a monster. It’s about family, about a kid who’s got reasons to give up but doesn’t. It’s about a town that’s got its secrets, the way every town does, and how those secrets can fester until something awful comes ripping through. And for King, sometimes the only way to tell that truth is to wrap it in fur and fangs.

Forty years on, Silver Bullet has found its pack. Folks who saw it as kids, sneaking into the theater or watching it late at night on VHS or cable TV, they still talk about it. They remember the fireworks scene, the preacher with his dark little secret, the way Marty’s motorized wheelchair—his “Silver Bullet”—became a symbol of fighting back against the dark.

So, on this October night, as the full moon creeps up over the horizon, and the air smells of pine and wolfsbane, remember werewolf movies that didn't hellaciously suck the way 2025's Wolf Man did. If you hear something howling out there in the dark, well…maybe lock the door. And maybe keep a little something shiny close by. You never know when you might need it.

Location: Maine, USA

Popular posts from this blog

Apple Hypercard links to the future on August 11, 1987

Image
Boston, Massachusetts - August 11, 1987   ZAP! POW! WHAMMO! On a muggy August day in 1987, in the heart of Boston’s MacWorld Expo, Apple Computer, those slick Silicon Valley shamans, unleashed a digital thunderbolt that’d make even the most jaded tech heads twitch like a hopped-up Kerouac on a Benzedrine bender. HyperCard ! The name alone was a neon sign flashing in the binary night, a promise of something wild, something free, something so gloriously unhinged it could turn every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a Macintosh into a programmer, a poet, a digital Prospero conjuring worlds from a 9-inch monochrome screen. Picture it: the convention floor, a buzzing bazaar of beige boxes and bespectacled geeks, the air thick with the hum of cooling fans and the fevered dreams of a thousand would-be Zuckerbergs. Apple’s booth is a temple, a shrine to the bitten fruit, and there, amid the faithful, Bill Atkinson—wild-haired, wild-eyed, the high priest of pixel and code—steps up to the altar. Thi...
Read more

Members Only jackets give entrée to the 80s' most-exclusive club

Image
ZOW! POW! WHAMMO! Here comes the 1980s, that electric decade, that glitter-burst epoch, strutting down the boulevard of history with a boombox on its shoulder, blasting synth-pop anthems into the ozone, the air thick with Aqua Net and ambition. And what’s that glinting in the strobe-lit haze? What’s that sleek silhouette slicing through the crowd like a shark fin through the waters of Port Harbor? It’s the Members Only jacket . Ah, the Members Only. A name that crackles with a delicious, almost illicit, exclusivity. Members of what , exactly? That remained wonderfully vague, a shimmering ambiguity that only enhanced its allure. Perhaps it was a club of the effortlessly cool, the possessors of some ineffable sprezzatura that allowed them to navigate the treacherous terrain of high school hallways and mall food courts with an air of insouciant command.  Perhaps it was a more metaphorical membership, a silent pact among those who understood the unspoken language of status, a visual ha...
Read more

Street Fighter establishes a new pugilistic order on August 30, 1987

Image
It was an unassuming Sunday in August. Yes, August 30, 1987. A date that, to the uninitiated, might seem as bland as white bread, but for those with their fingers on the pulsing joystick of popular culture, it marked the dawn of a new pugilistic order! Before this day, the arcade scene, a kaleidoscope of flashing lights and cacophonous bleeps, was already a vibrant, electric beast. You had your Pac-Man gobbling pellets, your Donkey Kong hurling barrels, your Gyruss spinning through the cosmos like a drunken astronaut. But these were games of reflexes, of pattern recognition, of the lone wolf versus the digital horde. Then came Street Fighter . Ka-POW! Wham! Thwack! Street Fighter came out of the shadows like a stranger stepping off a midnight bus, carrying a promise of violence and something deeper—something that hummed in the blood. Capcom, those game design wizards from Osaka, Japan, birthed it. A coin-op machine with a cabinet painted in bold reds and blues, it stood there in the ar...
Read more