SPOILER ALERT: This article contains major spoilers for “The Cycle,” now streaming on Shudder. What if a werewolf continued to transform even after its death? This light bulb idea came to frequent collaborators Jordan Downey and Kevin Stewart as they were sketching out a TV treatment for their 2018 film “The Head Hunter.” “We both looked at each other and stopped and were like, ‘Wait, that’s a really cool, fun idea and a take on werewolves that we’ve never seen before,’” Downey says.
I can’t think of a movie or a show.’ We Googled it and realized, no, it hasn’t been done. What do you do with that idea?” The result is “The Cycle,” a handsomely shot detective story following Meg (Deborah Ann Woll) and Marks (Jeffrey Donovan) as experts trying to solve a lycanthropic murder mystery — although the film largely keeps the exact supernatural entity a mystery, until the third act goes full creature feature. Downey, who co-wrote the film with Stewart and directed it, thought that outsized hook would benefit from a recognizable framing.
They would come into this crime scene and they would see these victims, but then they’d find this naked dead guy not knowing that he’s harboring something supernatural. So it made sense that there really wasn’t another package to put it into.” Once the case is cracked, the third act shifts hard into monster movie mode, complete with plenty of practical blood, guts and werewolf nastiness. You go into ‘The Cycle’ not knowing that’s what’s coming.
I thought what would happen is the characters would be thrust into a completely crazy change in their lives, that they now exist in a world where werewolves can be real and there’s one in proximity to them. That change would be as shocking to them as it hopefully would be to the audience. So we were aware of trying to do things early in the movie, so when that tonal shift happens, it felt earned but also surprising.” Ushering in the change of pace was the transformation scene, which is one of the most loved traditions in werewolf movies and was exciting for the team to plan for, along with key special effects artist and supervisor Patrick Magee.
But we just felt like enough time had gone where we hadn’t seen that done very well for so many years. So we said right away, ‘If we’re going to do this, we have to do a proper werewolf transformation. We have to nail it.’ We storyboarded it a lot.
We talked about it a lot. We broke down the best scenes that had been done and thought about … Do we want to see foot? Do we want to see eyes, teeth?
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