Ask a director what kept them up at night on a creature feature and you would expect the answer to have fur. Jordan Downey’s answer takes place in a small room full of actors and a mouthful of dialogue. “Those are the scenes that scare me the most as a director,” he told me. “It’s not the monster stuff.”
That line ended up framing my whole conversation about The Cycle with Downey and his stars Deborah Ann Woll and Jeffrey Donovan. The film has a creature at its center. What they really wanted to talk about was the people standing in front of it.
One Room and One Day
Jordan Downey planned for the creature from the start. “That was the thing that I knew would be so difficult,” he said. “So we just invested so much time into that, and that’s a prep-based problem.”
The morgue was a different beast. “It was a small room. It’s all of us there,” he said. It was the first day on set for Jeffrey Donovan, Will Hochman and Jeb Berrier, and the scene came loaded with scientific exposition. “We had one day to shoot it. It’s a really important scene. You had a mouthful of science speak and we had to get it.” Get it wrong and the whole movie tilts. “If you don’t nail that scene the mystery doesn’t have something to go from.”
He’s just as proud of a police station scene. “I love the wolf and everything else,” he said. “But there’s a police station scene that I’m like, I wouldn’t change a thing about this.”
A Stephen King Kind of Town
Jordan Downey has called The Cycle a love letter to Stephen King. The monster isn’t really the point of that comparison. The town is. He described “a small town where there is some supernatural threat or problem and everything’s a little misty and foggy and dreary.” Something is always “creeping under the surface.” Most importantly, he said “the people are very real and relatable.”
I told him he nailed it. I stand by that.
Head on a Swivel
Jeffrey Donovan plays Marks, a father whose loss drives him toward the thing in the woods. He built the character from something every parent knows. “Being a dad you kind of walk around even in this day and age with your head on a swivel,” he said. “Where’s a threat? Is it the car? Is it a cliff?”
That constant low hum of fear explains Marks’s urgency. “Why he has such an emotional rapid response to ‘I must find this thing,’ it’s fueled by losing his son.”
The film keeps that backstory lean on purpose. Pickup scenes added a little more, but the team resisted spelling it out. As one of them put it, “It’s more interesting to know that there is some kind of disconnect or trauma or hurt inside these people.”
The Scientist Who Steps Forward
Deborah Ann Woll plays Meg, a scientist who meets the impossible and tries to reason her way through it. “I’m a science geek,” she said, laughing. The idea was to let viewers experience “a preternatural story through the eyes of a scientist” and take “that same logical journey.” I hadn’t seen a creature film lean into that before and it really works.
Meg is not built to scream and run. “Her smarty pants is her superpower,” Woll said. Then came the thought she briefly lost and then rescued mid-interview. “As a scientist it’s not only a monster. It’s something to be studied. It’s a specimen.”
That curiosity is what keeps Meg from becoming a victim. “You’re only a victim if you’re running and you don’t want to die and then suddenly you’re murdered,” Woll said. “But if you take the step forward, that’s agency.”
More from Fantastic Fest 2026: our full lineup preview, our review of Resident Evil, and our interview with the director of Red Snow.
