The Cycle Interview | Fantastic Fest 2026
The Cycle doesn’t initially behave much like a werewolf movie.
That is entirely intentional.
During Fantastic Fest 2026, Horror Movies Uncut and The Final Cut sat down with filmmaker Jordan Downey and stars Rebecca Ann Woll and Jeffrey Donovan to discuss the film’s unusual progression from patient forensic crime procedural into full-fledged creature horror, the extensive research behind Woll’s forensic anthropologist and why even the wildest supernatural material needed to remain emotionally grounded.
For Downey, getting audiences invested in the investigation before revealing the film’s larger genre ambitions was essential. The challenge wasn’t simply concealing what was coming, but ensuring the two sides of the movie ultimately felt as though they belonged together.
“You have to believe you’re watching one movie,” Downey told HMU.
That creates another problem once the transformation happens. If the procedural and creature-feature portions feel completely disconnected, the audience can feel tricked rather than rewarded.
Downey’s solution was to quietly establish a shared cinematic language across both halves. Visual choices that might seem perfectly natural during the investigation begin making more sense once the movie enters its more overtly horrific territory, while the emotional groundwork established early continues into the creature material.
Finding that balance required experimentation, conversations and plenty of editing.
The method also allows The Cycle to spend considerable time with Woll’s Meg, a forensic anthropologist whose clinical relationship with death carries a more personal dimension.
Woll approached Meg as someone who may have found a way to put structure around something she otherwise finds emotionally difficult to confront.
“When death is something that’s such a huge part of her life,” Woll said, turning it into something scientific and clinical can create distance from those emotions.
The Cycle eventually removes that separation.
Meg is forced to confront death simultaneously as something that can be examined scientifically and something deeply personal, allowing the investigation and character drama to begin overlapping as the movie grows darker.
For Donovan’s Sheriff Marks, what initially appears to be another investigation in a small town carries its own emotional complications.
Donovan was attracted to the familiarity of the setup — a lawman investigating what initially appears to be a plausible crime — before the story begins dismantling the future Marks believes is waiting for him.
The sheriff can imagine retirement ahead of him, sitting on his porch and watching his son continue protecting the community. The investigation violently interferes with that expectation, forcing Marks into a level of grief Donovan found considerably more interesting than simply playing another authority figure.
Exploring the character’s emotional core and discovering what kind of fortitude remained once his personal and professional worlds collided became central to Donovan’s performance.
That emotional foundation is given considerable room because Downey refuses to hurry the movie toward its monster.
In fact, The Cycle became even more patient during editing.
Downey revealed that an earlier version included another glimpse of the wolf before the point where audiences now encounter it. The scene was ultimately removed, allowing the finished cut to hold back the creature longer.
Everyone involved remained committed to withholding the reveal until nearly the breaking point.
“The movie has a lot of air in it,” Downey said.
Where another film might shorten scenes, add more score or constantly accelerate the pacing, Downey felt The Cycle needed to resist that instinct. If the movie was eventually going to become considerably more aggressive, the earlier material needed enough restraint to make that escalation matter.
Woll found that pacing particularly appropriate for Meg.
Forensic anthropology itself requires patience. Bodies decompose over extended periods. Cold cases can remain unresolved for years. Families wait for information, while investigators work slowly through remains that may offer extraordinarily small clues.
That process informed not only the tempo of the film but Woll’s preparation for the role.
She had already developed an interest in forensic anthropology before The Cycle and had read work by forensic anthropologist Dr. Kathy Reichs. When Downey began recommending research materials, Woll recognized some of the territory immediately and continued digging deeper.
The production also arranged a conversation with a forensic expert, giving Woll another opportunity to understand the discipline behind Meg’s work.
What fascinated her most was how almost supernatural genuine forensic expertise can appear.
“Forensic anthropology feels like magic,” Woll said.
A skilled specialist can examine something as small as a bone and potentially determine age, disease, physical history and other details that would appear invisible to an untrained observer.
Woll wanted Meg to possess that quality.
“I really wanted to show that,” she said. “I wanted it to look like Meg was a bit of a magician.”
That creates an intriguing relationship with the film’s eventual supernatural elements. Even as The Cycle enters werewolf territory, Woll and Downey wanted the creature mythology to retain a sense of biological reality.
The supernatural is present, but it isn’t completely disconnected from medicine and physical evidence. Instead, the film treats what is happening as something organic that exists perhaps one step beyond what its characters can currently explain.
That grounded approach also appealed to Donovan.
Having previously played law enforcement and authority figures, he understood the familiar rhythms of the film’s opening investigation. His conversations with Downey established that Sheriff Marks should approach the situation as a legitimate mystery requiring detective work rather than behaving like someone who already knows he’s trapped inside a horror movie.
Something happened.
The characters need to determine what it was.
Only later does that recognizable crime-story framework collide with a werewolf tearing through the people around them.
Donovan’s enthusiasm for that transition is tied partly to his admiration for An American Werewolf in London, a film he cited as the werewolf movie that left the largest impression on him.
What stayed with Donovan wasn’t simply the transformation or violence. It was the ability to humanize the creature.
He identified a moment in The Cycle that gave him a similar response: an interaction in which a character’s reaction to the wolf briefly forces the audience to see something beyond the monster.
For Donovan, those moments are what allow creature horror to become something more lasting than spectacle.
Downey shares a similar philosophy toward genre.
“I am not a horror movie fan, but all my favorite movies are horror movies,” he said.
The distinction comes down to what the genre is being used to accomplish.
Blood, gore and creatures alone aren’t necessarily what interest him. A genre film becomes more compelling when the monster, violence or supernatural conceit is functioning on another level.
“The only reason to make a genre film is if you’re saying something about society,” Downey said. “It’s a metaphor.”
That belief helps explain why The Cycle spends so much time establishing its characters, investigative process and emotional stakes before fully embracing the werewolf movie hiding underneath.
The creature may eventually emerge, but Downey isn’t interested in allowing it to erase everything that came before.
Instead, the procedural gives the horror credibility. The forensic science gives the impossible something tangible to push against. And the family relationships ensure that when the violence finally arrives, the consequences extend beyond simply surviving the next attack.
For The Cycle, becoming a werewolf movie isn’t the abandonment of the grounded mystery that opens the film.
It’s where that mystery was heading all along.
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