If you’ve ever been to a film festival, then you can relate to the feeling that virtually every movie you’re seeing is something you’re experiencing without preconceived notions. You might be familiar with the filmmakers or the stars or, depending on the title, you may have seen some promotional materials, but that’s a far cry from seeing a movie earn a wide release after months of promotion. For movies that come from smaller studios and distributors, however, what makes seeing a movie at a festival is that, good or bad, every title feels like a discovery.
Filmmaker Jordan Downey‘s The Cycle has been making the rounds on the festival circuit, with many of the reactions being an appreciation of entering the movie without preconceived notions. While we want to maintain that experience for you, we can say that the overall tone of the narrative starts in one place and evolves into something entirely different.
Speaking with Bloody Disgusting about developing the pacing of the script, Downey explained, “Most of the time spent in the script is how [and] when we reveal something, because the theory was that you want to get the audience right up to that breaking point of, ‘Where is this movie going? Do I want to turn it off? Do I want to leave the theater?’ Whatever that experience is you’re having, and right then, you do the shift.”
“There’s no book on ‘here’s how you do it’ or some formula, it was just having people read the script and watching cuts of the movie, and we messed around a lot with the edit and how much to pull out,” Downey noted. “It’s just trial and error, honestly, and really a lot of just trying to think about as massive horror fans and cinephiles ourselves, where would I start to pick up on things? What weird stuff do I need to see that just gives me a plethora of options so that I’m not being fooled specifically in that, ‘Oh, that’s not what’s really happening.’ It’s more just, ‘I don’t know what’s happening because it could be this, this, this, this, but then there’s a corpse, but the corpse caught on fire. Where is this going?’ And then it just all hopefully comes together.”
In the movie, when the body of a man missing for 36 years is discovered at the scene of a horrific crime, it’s up to his estranged daughter to unravel his dark past.
The Cycle stars Deborah Ann Woll and Jeffrey Donovan, with the pair reflecting on their experience of discovering the many layers of the narrative.
“[Downey] must have told me in his prologue what it was going to be, but I think it wouldn’t have mattered either way because I was in by page 30. The script was so good and the mystery was so good and the character was so good that, whether it had a twist or not … wouldn’t have changed my mind,” Woll recalled. “I am a big fan of movies that shift genre. I always talk about The Descent as one of my favorite horror movies, and I like that you start off thinking, ‘Oh, this is a survivalist movie. Oh, no, wait, this is a psychological horror movie. Oh, no, wait, this is a straight-up creature feature. And it’s fun that it shifts you that way.”
She added, “So I think, more as an artist, as a storyteller, I read it and I went, ‘Okay, great. This is really smart,’ the way that this is convincing you wholly that this is one type of movie and that it will subvert your expectations.”
Donovan, meanwhile, had a different reaction. He pointed out how the script included a character installing a retinal scanner, and while this might seem like a minute detail, it implied a much bigger world.
“I will say that one of the things that when I first read it, which is a small, very small detail in the script, that actually I put down the script at that point and told my agent, ‘I want to meet Jordan,’ was when the [character] … he starts scanning his eye,” the actor expressed. “I went, ‘Wow, that is cool, because that says so many different things … It just worked on so many levels, but it was only a third of a page. It just said, ‘Access denied, access denied, access granted.’ I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ For some reason, that was a big surprise to me in a wonderful way.”
Woll plays a forensic anthropologist whose journey starts when she is analyzing a dead body for clues. The actor did plenty of research into the role and the actual experiences of forensic scientists.
“For me, it’s the magic trick. It’s the magic trick that is forensic anthropology, that you read these accounts in the several books that I read where they’ll find the tip of a pinky bone and be able to tell you everything about this person and their past, and it looks like magic, but it’s not,” Woll pointed out of what her research helped her with the most. “It’s based on years of deduction and research and education. And that was important to me, was that when we watch Meg do her work, that it feels a little bit like a magic trick, that she is seeing things that no one else is going to see, and that ultimately this is a power for good that she has.”
Downey, who co-wrote the movie with Kevin Stewart, says that The X-Files was a major influence on the overall tone, approaching the potentially otherworldly elements clinically. He cited that favorite installments in the series were episodes like “Home” and “Humbug,” and a major inspiration was a behind-the-scenes photo from the set of the movie sequel The X-Files: I Want to Believe, which featured a monstrous creature that never appeared in the film.
The filmmaker confirmed that The Cycle exists in a similar world to The X-Files and that there could be even more bizarre occurrences out there.
“I think it is in that same X-Files space that there can be aliens, there can be vampires, there can be ghouls, ghosts, hauntings, whatever, but it’s not common enough for everyday people to have those experiences,” Downey detailed. “I see it as in that same world, especially because we have a character in our movie that, at the end of the film, you see the research that he’s done, and there are a lot of hints that he has expanded into some strange spaces that exist in the depths of the internet.”
Be sure to watch the full interviews at the bottom of the page.
The Cycle lands on Shudder on October 23.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
