Riding the Bullet

Riding the Bullet (2004) is a Stephen King horror thriller you can watch online on iFILM. Director Mick Garris — who has adapted King more than any other filmmaker — brought King's e-novella to the screen with Jonathan Jackson as Alan Parker, an art student who learns his mother has had a stroke and sets out to hitchhike across rural Maine to reach her.

It's 1969. The roads are empty, the dark is thick, and Alan has spent months fixating on death long before this night. David Arquette plays a driver who picks him up on a stretch of highway where nobody should be driving, and that encounter is where the film stops being a road movie and becomes something else entirely. Barbara Hershey is the mother at the end of the journey; Erika Christensen is the girlfriend Alan left behind.

Garris builds dread out of choices rather than creatures, which makes the horror here more disquieting than a conventional monster story. Stream Riding the Bullet (2004) online on iFILM.