SPOILER ALERT: This article contains major spoilers for “The Cycle,” now streaming on Shudder.
What if a werewolf continued to transform even after its death?
This light bulb idea came to frequent collaborators Jordan Downey and Kevin Stewart as they were sketching out a TV treatment for their 2018 film “The Head Hunter.”
“We both looked at each other and stopped and were like, ‘Wait, that’s a really cool, fun idea and a take on werewolves that we’ve never seen before,’” Downey says. “Being the horror cinephiles that we are, we were like, ‘I don’t think anyone’s done that. I can’t think of a movie or a show.’ We Googled it and realized, no, it hasn’t been done. What do you do with that idea?”
The result is “The Cycle,” a handsomely shot detective story following Meg (Deborah Ann Woll) and Marks (Jeffrey Donovan) as experts trying to solve a lycanthropic murder mystery — although the film largely keeps the exact supernatural entity a mystery, until the third act goes full creature feature.
Downey, who co-wrote the film with Stewart and directed it, thought that outsized hook would benefit from a recognizable framing.
“Right away, it felt like it fit best into a crime mystery, a police procedural,” he says. “Ultimately, if you have this werewolf that is going to reanimate and then at dawn turn back into a man — but in this case it’s a deceased man who doesn’t move, walk, talk, has no life — that would just be dumbfounding to police. They would come into this crime scene and they would see these victims, but then they’d find this naked dead guy not knowing that he’s harboring something supernatural. So it made sense that there really wasn’t another package to put it into.”
Once the case is cracked, the third act shifts hard into monster movie mode, complete with plenty of practical blood, guts and werewolf nastiness.
“I love creature features,” Downey says. “I didn’t want it to be this ‘elevated,’ pretentious experience that didn’t give monster movie fans the proper experience. You go into ‘The Cycle’ not knowing that’s what’s coming. I thought what would happen is the characters would be thrust into a completely crazy change in their lives, that they now exist in a world where werewolves can be real and there’s one in proximity to them. That change would be as shocking to them as it hopefully would be to the audience. So we were aware of trying to do things early in the movie, so when that tonal shift happens, it felt earned but also surprising.”
Ushering in the change of pace was the transformation scene, which is one of the most loved traditions in werewolf movies and was exciting for the team to plan for, along with key special effects artist and supervisor Patrick Magee.
“The first thing was acknowledging that if you’re going to make a werewolf movie, we didn’t want to run from that challenge,” Downey says. “In the ’80s, Rob Bottin and Rick Baker nailed it with ‘The Howling’ and ‘An American Werewolf in London.’ In the years since, people have shied away from it because either it’s too expensive, too time-consuming or maybe there’s a clever new way of doing it. But we just felt like enough time had gone where we hadn’t seen that done very well for so many years. So we said right away, ‘If we’re going to do this, we have to do a proper werewolf transformation. We have to nail it.’ We storyboarded it a lot. We talked about it a lot. We broke down the best scenes that had been done and thought about … Do we want to see foot? Do we want to see hands? Do we want to see eyes, teeth? Is it a spinal cord? All of the different things that we wanted to see in our scene, and then how it would apply to an undead corpse version of a transformation.
Beyond the horror element, the film examines the complex choices that can come with fatherhood, which comes most notably via Meg, who learns that her long-lost parent is the werewolf at the heart of the story.
“It wasn’t in the first drafts, to be honest,” Downey says. “In our initial treatments, Meg was investigating a stranger. It was the same concept that a man’s body was discovered, the police didn’t know how he was tied to these murders, and they went to her because she was an expert in her field, but he wasn’t her father. We got her into Act Three, when she went to the house, just like in the movie where they go to investigate his whereabouts and the life of the recluse. We felt like she was putting herself in this really dangerous position, without some kind of an emotional tie to that character. I told Kevin that I don’t believe that the character would do this given the circumstances. We were also missing something that I thought is really important in horror films, which is the heart and the pathos of a monster movie and the tragedy. So then, we came up with the idea that, ‘OK, what if this is her father?’ So now we’ve anchored something to her emotionally. We can work in the tragedy of this man who left, but it was in her mind for a terrible reason, a father walking out on their children. In his mind, it was to protect them. And once we had that for her father, then we started to apply that theme to some of the other characters.”
Much like the cycle of undead werewolves, it’s easy to see this story carry on through new chapters. Downey says he’s happy keeping “The Cycle” as a single story, but has also mulled over what a larger scope could be.
“I think this movie is self-contained and there’s versions of it that I would probably not be interested in,” Downey says. “But we did talk a lot about different stories. I think there’s a great prequel in the original werewolf that came from over the sea. There’s an aquatic, boat-set version of this story that I think would be interesting. You could do a TV series about the life and the trials of [Meg’s father] Peter Stump and all of the different things that he was doing while isolated for those 30 years. I think it’d be interesting to see … because she’s so good at her job, and in the final scene of the movie so confident that she’s gonna get this figured out. But what if she didn’t? What if 10, 15, 20 years goes by and she has not solved it and she is now facing the same dilemma her dad was, which was, ‘This fucking thing can’t be stopped.’ But by killing herself, that does nothing. Finding her at a point of quit would be really interesting. I’d only want to do stuff if Deborah and Jeffrey wanted to come back and work on it again, and if there were fans that wanted it to happen, but I would never say no.”
Watch the trailer for “The Cycle” below.