‘Breeder’ Trailer Sends a College Student Into an Outrageous Poodle Ranch Nightmare

Daniel Doheny enters a bizarre situation at a remote ranch in Alex Goyette’s horror-comedy thriller Breeder.

A promise of research funding comes with one seriously disturbing catch in Breeder, the new darkly driven horror-comedy thriller from writer-director Alex Goyette.

The official trailer has arrived ahead of the film’s theatrical release on October 16, offering a first look at a story that starts with a broke college student, an eccentric poodle breeder and an opportunity that quickly becomes far stranger than expected.

https://youtu.be/9MeILB0M274?si=j2EHp9VAzKTz4L7n

Breeder follows a financially struggling student who is lured to a remote ranch by a peculiar breeder promising to fund his research. It sounds like a potential solution to his problems — until he arrives and discovers exactly what his new benefactor has in mind.

And judging by the trailer, Breeder has absolutely no intention of playing this scenario straight.

Goyette appears to be leaning heavily into the absurdity of the premise, mixing an isolated-ranch nightmare with dark comedy, increasingly bizarre behavior and the lingering question of exactly what kind of operation our protagonist has stumbled into.

The film stars Daniel Doheny, Dot-Marie Jones, Maddie Phillips, Tanaya Beatty and Paige McGarvin.

Jones should be particularly recognizable to genre and television audiences, while Phillips has already spent time navigating bloody genre territory. Here, the ensemble is dropped into a premise that looks increasingly unhinged the longer the trailer runs.

There is also something immediately effective about using a seemingly harmless world like dog breeding as the gateway into something much darker. Horror has always been particularly good at taking ordinary subcultures and isolated communities and asking what happens when someone from the outside discovers the rules aren’t quite what they expected.

Breeder looks ready to push that idea toward its most ridiculous extremes.

Based on what we’re seeing in the official trailer, this could easily become one of those movies audiences spend as much time talking about afterward as they do watching. Whether the full film can sustain the outrageous energy of its marketing remains to be seen, but Goyette certainly isn’t being shy about what kind of ride audiences are being invited to take.

Watch the official trailer for Breeder and let us know what you think. Does this dark horror-comedy look completely insane in the right ways, or are you still trying to figure out exactly what is happening at that ranch?

Breeder, written and directed by Alex Goyette, arrives in theaters October 16.