Riding the Bullet: The Deluxe Special Edition Double • Letter from Mick Garris
About the Book • Ordering Information • Letter from the Author • Photos • Artwork

Easily the least commercially successful film project I’ve ever done, it’s also my most personal.  It was Stephen King’s first piece of fiction that he wrote after the accident that almost claimed his life, published originally on the Internet before finding print in EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL.

Matters of life and death had been touching my family circle much too close for comfort in the time surrounding my first read of the tale, and it pierced my heart.  I had lost my younger brother to a devastating and withering illness several years before; my father was traveling a long road to his demise as his heart slowly wore out; and my mother-in-law was diagnosed with a fatal illness right around the time of its first publication on the Web.

A Sophie’s choice about choosing who gets life and who gets death became a very personal one for me.  I’m sure to the casual King reader, it was just a cracking ghost story.  But for me, as soon as I read it, I wanted to take that 30-page tale and feed it with my own life.

I, a child of the sixties, a bit younger than the hero of the film.  So my decision to set the film in 1969, rather than in the present of 1999, when King set the story, had many reasons.  One, the choice of life and death was not just an individual one.  I think that our society made a global such choice during the turmoil of the sixties.  And not necessarily for the better.

The first act, setting up the central character as an art student obsessed with the imagery of death, a 21-year-old who lost his father to suicide, was a chapter of my own invention, an idea that I wanted to graft onto King’s moral dilemma, making that choice even more complicated.  Dreams vs. reality, a concept that is all too familiar to the genre fan, was something I wanted to tinker with and see if I could bring something new to it.  This was what I set out to do.

RIDING THE BULLET has had the most mixed reaction of any film I’ve ever made.  When I first wrote the script on spec, with King’s kind permission, my agent thought it would make for a huge studio sale, and become a major studio film.  Well, my script was just a bit too outside the norm for their tastes.  Is it a horror film, or a reflection on life, death, and the Beatles?  Well, I thought, can’t it be all those things?

The film ended up being made on a very small budget as an independent.  It was only released theatrically in three U.S. cities before being sold to the USA Network and its sister channel, SciFi, for an exclusive six-year run, cut to ribbons.

Horror fans expecting a balls-to-the-wall Stephen King horror thriller were ultimately disappointed at how emotional it gets.  Whenever I showed it at film festivals around the world, with a little introduction about what the film was intended to be, it was well received.  But you can’t do that before every show.  A horror film is sold on the horror—elements which I was encouraged to beef up, by the way, and I did—but this one, for whatever reasons, did not find the intended audience.

I like to think of RIDING THE BULLET, the film, as misunderstood.  I appreciate Lonely Road Books giving people the opportunity of seeing this child’s formative stages, especially next to the brilliant short story that inspired it: the story I hoped so deeply to show respect.

— Mick Garris