A woman in a dark rain jacket stands in a cinderblock hallway with an FBI agent at her shoulder, explaining something she clearly does not want to be true, and a few cuts later a pair of green-gloved hands is peeling back something on a steel table that was never meant to be human. That is the shape of the new trailer for “The Cycle”, a Shudder original arriving October 23rd. It comes with a blurb most horror films would trade a limb for. Stephen King calls it “a terrific fright flick”, and then goes further: “The Thing meets The Silence of the Lambs.”
The film is not based on anything King wrote, despite a fair amount of confusion online, and that makes the endorsement more interesting rather than less. It is an original story from director Jordan Downey, who co-wrote it with his longtime cinematographer Kevin Stewart. It follows Meg (Deborah Ann Woll), a woman whose estranged father turns up dead at the scene of a horrific crime, thirty-six years after he vanished. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “The Cycle” and for what its trailer shows of the creature.
The film is not based on anything King wrote, despite a fair amount of confusion online, and that makes the endorsement more interesting rather than less.”
The official logline is spare: when the body of a man missing for thirty-six years is discovered at the scene of a horrific crime, it is up to his estranged daughter to unravel his dark past. Meg is a forensic anthropologist, and that turns out to be the most important detail in the setup. It means the person investigating the mystery is also the person who has to put her hands on whatever was found. The trailer plays the first half like a police procedural, with rain, umbrellas, a muddy field ringed by investigators and a grim local police officer, before it lets you see what the procedure is really about.
What it shows of the creature is rationed carefully. There is a gaping, tooth-ringed mouth in close-up, gray and wet, that could belong to almost anything. There is a ridged, segmented back glimpsed in the dark, and a clawed hand gripping a window frame from outside. Most unsettling of all is a grainy, washed-out shot of a hunched figure in a cardigan, sitting in a chair under fluorescent light, with something very wrong about its face. One international poster is less coy, putting a snarling wolf against a full moon on the one-sheet. The trailer never puts any of it together. It never tells you whether the thing in the chair and the thing in the dark are the same creature at different stages, which is presumably where the title comes in.
That ambiguity is the point of King’s comparison. “The Thing” is about not knowing what is inside the person standing next to you, and “The Silence of the Lambs” is about a woman working a case whose evidence is bodies, under the gaze of men who are not sure she belongs there. Put them together and you get a procedural in which the forensic work itself becomes the horror. The trailer leans hard into that idea, from Meg flipping through an old notebook of anatomical sketches to a row of specimen jars with something dark curled in the glass. The closing title cards are three words, one at a time: “It begins again.”
Woll is the right person to carry it. Most audiences know her as Karen Page in Marvel’s “Daredevil” and now “Daredevil: Born Again”, or as the young vampire Jessica Hamby in HBO’s “True Blood”, and both roles traded on the same quality the trailer is selling here: a character who looks steady and ordinary until you see the fear she is holding in. In “The Cycle” she gets something closer to a lead in a straight horror film, a genre she has circled for years without fully committing to, and the early reactions single her out.
The supporting cast has a nice bit of genre history in it. Jeffrey Donovan, of “Burn Notice” and the recent “Villains”, co-stars, along with Gretchen Corbett, Jack Doolan and Will Hochman. Don Keith Opper is also in the cast. Horror fans will know him as Charlie from all four “Critters” films, which is a lovely piece of casting for a movie that its own marketing sells on rubber and blood. Patrick Magee designed the creature effects.
That practical work is the thing the festival crowd keeps talking about. Director Mick Garris, quoted in the trailer, calls the film “an over-the-top celebration of practical effects”, and other cards promise “one of the most original twists in modern horror” and “an absolute cannot-miss horror-thriller.” The film premiered at Fantastic Fest in Austin in September, where it reportedly took a special mention in the horror features competition. The early reviews have been strong, with critics praising a slow first half that pays off in a gory, hands-on second one and a morgue sequence several of them singled out.
Downey’s path to this film is one of the better stories in independent horror. He made his name with “ThanksKilling” in 2008, a deliberately ridiculous micro-budget comedy about a murderous turkey that became a cult object. Then he took a sharp turn into seriousness with “The Head Hunter” in 2018, a lean, near-silent medieval monster film shot on a shoestring that earned real respect from genre critics. He has called “The Cycle” a love letter to Stephen King, and it is easy to see the line from that film’s patient, practical creature work to this one. Stewart was his partner on that film as well, shooting it and co-writing it. Going from a near-silent monster film with a handful of actors to a cast led by a Marvel regular and an endorsement from King is a big jump in scale for the pair, and it is exactly the jump Shudder exists to make possible.
The setting looks like a character too. The trailer is full of gray Pacific Northwest weather, long bridges over flat water, wet timber houses and a river town that looks as if it has been waiting decades for something to come back. The production reportedly shot in Astoria, Oregon. A thirty-six-year gap, a small town and a body that should not be there is the setup King himself has built entire novels on, which is probably the reason he connected with it.
Shudder is releasing it on October 23rd in the United States and the United Kingdom, with AMC+ carrying it in the U.S. too, which puts it squarely in the streaming service’s Halloween run. It runs just under two hours, which is long for a creature feature and says something about how much time the film spends on the investigation before the monster arrives. For an audience that likes its horror patient, that is a promise, and for everyone else it might be a warning.
There is a risk in all of this, and it is worth naming. A blurb from King sells subscriptions, but it also sets a bar, and a slow procedural that saves its monster for the second hour could frustrate viewers who arrive expecting wall-to-wall creature work. The festival reviews suggest the payoff is probably there, at least for horror fans. Whether a living-room audience, phones in hand, sits through the first hour to reach it is the open question, and it may decide whether “The Cycle” becomes a word-of-mouth hit this October or a film people discover, slightly embarrassed, a year from now.
What Do You Think? Does Stephen King’s “The Thing meets The Silence of the Lambs” sell you on “The Cycle”, or do you take author blurbs with a grain of salt? Is Deborah Ann Woll ready to lead a full horror film after years in Hell’s Kitchen? And how much of the creature should a trailer show before release?
See you on the next binge!
