Special Report: The Cycle (2026)

0:04 Hold your ears, folks.

0:06 It's showtime.

0:08 People pay good money to see this movie.

0:10 When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the projection booth.

0:17 Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.

0:20 Turn it off. About a month ago, we found three bodies at a house on the coast of Leicester Bay. They were torn apart.

0:49 Do you have any idea by what?

0:52 No.

0:57 The third body didn't quite belong. To be clear, this is why I'm here today. The third body is your father. It's coming for me.

1:13 Welcome back, Peter.

1:48 Hey folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White. On this episode, I am talking with Jordan Downey. He is the director and co-writer of the new film, The Cycle. It is going to be premiering on Shudder on October 23rd, 2026. The film stars Debra Ann Wall and Jeffrey Donovan. Had a great time watching this one. I had a great time talking with Jordan, and I hope you have a great time listening.

2:12 Enjoy.

2:13 Enjoy. Before we even start to talk about this new film, The Cycle, I am so curious about one that's on your CV. It looks like you made a Critters movie, a short.

2:23 Oh, yeah. So right there's a Critter ball from the first movie. I'm obsessed with Critters. Yeah, it's on YouTube. That's like seven minutes long, but long story short, there was, I don't know if you saw the two more recent Critters movies, but at some point there was like the web series one was announced and that's my favorite movie ever.

2:44 It's the thing that made me want to become a filmmaker. And when I read this is 10 years ago, I read that they were going to reboot it. And I was like, I got to make something to try to throw my ring in the hat. Is it for a director? And I got it to them and they never called me back. So it didn't go anywhere, but, but the short's really cool. And it's my love letter to the thing that I grew up loving.

3:06 When you get to play a bounty hunter. And I think the bounty hunters in the first movie were my favorite characters.

3:11 There's one of their guns from the first movie as well. You are obsessed.

3:16 I agree. I love it.

3:17 I am obsessed. Yeah, I agree. The bounty hunters were the thing that made them special, and it was always so disappointing that they kind of got away from them. Did you notice at the beginning of Cycle, that first actor, Don Opper, who was in the Critters movie? No one has mentioned him yet, but I figure somebody at some point would notice him.

3:38 Where did the idea for the Cycle come from?

3:41 So our previous film, The Headhunter, that movie came out because of that. I met a producer named James Harris. He saw The Headhunter, reached out to me, and just wanted to spark up a relationship. He liked the movie, and we met for beers. And at the end of that first or second time that I sat with him, he said, hey, there's like three types of movies that I want to make. I forget the other two. It may have been something funny. It was like a spider movie, a whale movie, and a werewolf movie.

4:10 And.

4:11 I was like, okay, cool.

4:12 Yeah.

4:13 I can like any of those if their idea is right. So then flash forward a couple months after that, I was working on a TV pitch. Kevin and I were trying to develop the headhunter for a TV series that we were going to pitch because we thought that he could go around hunting other monsters in this kingdom. And while we were working on that, there was a scene in the headhunter for anyone who knows it. When he comes back, he opens up one of his sacks and he sticks a werewolf head onto the wall on a spike.

4:41 the next morning he wakes up and his wounds are healing. And in the background, you see that werewolf head. And I was telling Kevin after the fact, this is years after we made the movie. I was like, ah, we should have swapped the head in the background for a human head because it's the next day, the full moon's down.

4:56 He would have transformed back. And Kevin was like, yeah, then another month later would be cool. If we put the werewolf head back on the wall. I was like, wait, you mean somebody would transform into a werewolf after they're dead? And he was like, yeah. And, just this light bulb went off and we're like, yeah, an undead werewolf. No one has done that. Like that's such a crazy twist on the lore. And if you did that, and if there was a werewolf that went on a killing spree, this undead one, it would maul its victims and eat them and dawn would come and it would become a troubled up corpse again. And the cops would be completely dumbfounded as to how that thing got in this crime scene, why these people were torn apart, why this wasn't. And

5:40 so we just thought, ah, that's such a great hook for a horror movie. And it consumed our lives for the entire duration of the pandemic and beyond to just write the script. And then, you know, how it comes back to James is that then he had said, I want to make a werewolf movie. So I pitched him this idea that we had just had. And he said, that's great. But keep the twist, hold the reveal as long as possible. And if you write that, I'll get it made for you guys. And he did.

6:08 And what year was this when he gave you the green light?

6:11 So it would have been the fall of 2019, I believe, that we had the idea. And sometime around January, February, he probably said, go for this, go write this. And then the pandemic really kicked off in March of 2020. So then Kevin and I were like, okay, we have tons of time now. So let's just start working on this.

6:35 Cast overall is just so solid. Your two leads in this, especially Debra Ann Wall, and I love Jeffrey Donovan. I've been a fan of his since The Pretender, and then of course Burn Notice. He's just wonderful. But yeah, the chemistry between those two and just her and her struggle, it's wonderful.

6:53 I can only take so much credit because they're just incredible actors. And if you have the right conversations with them ahead of time and they get the clarity on the approach and everything that they need from me, then when you get to set, and do it, they bring magic that I don't, there's no misconception of directors kind of whispering little like, you know, actionable items. Sometimes that happens, but oftentimes it's like they're professionals. You know, we're there.

7:17 We talk about what the scene is, then they do it. And those two just nailed it.

7:22 Yeah.

7:22 I love seeing them work together. I also was a big fan of Jeffrey's and I love that in this movie specifically, he exists in the shadows a little bit, especially in the first like third of the movie until he kind of steps forward and it's really his son that's taking charge until he's forced to have to. And I thought that's a really fun way to just use casting as a way to throw you off too, because why would Jeffrey Donovan be in this movie to just stand around and watch other people talk? So you're kind of just like, what is going on here? When you do things like that, I think it makes, it throws the audience off in many different ways. not just plot, but I think you can mess with people too. And

8:02 just like who you put in these roles and, and when you bring them into focus.

8:08 Movie has a really good look. And I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about your DP, your production designer, because everything just comes together very well.

8:17 So Kevin Stewart, who was also the co-writer on this with me and was the cinematographer and the colorist and did some visual effects. He and I have collaborated for every movie. So we, we, we're in lockstep from the beginning to the end, as far as just the look of the movie. And we're oftentimes coming up with that look early on by looking at references while we're working on the script and making folders and sharing clips and scenes and saying, Oh, it should be like this movie and that. So we're building that sort of library of look references in our head as it's being developed from the very get go. And then we're very careful in the locations that we select that that are going to, I'm a big proponent. I think for low budget filmmaking,

9:01 one of the best things you can do for yourself is pick locations that you could take a camera to, and it's going to look great. When soon as you pull that, the turn the camera on, you don't need big lights. You don't need to augment, build giant structures or anything that then you bring in someone like our production designer, Patrick O'Donnell, who the incredible thing about him is this is his first movie as a production designer.

9:24 He had sort of been an art director on another film that our producer James had produced. And he said, hey, Jordan, you should... I didn't have a go-to production designer that I was just constantly working with because we would flip around so much. And James said, you should meet with Patrick. And I did. And he is a horror fan like me and just spoke the language. I just got a better...

9:44 I didn't need to see some laundry list of his work to feel like he was the right person for it. So me and Kevin and Patrick were... the three of us spend the most time working on this movie out of anybody as far as just like us being on set all the time. the time and the scouting and the picking the locations and letting Patrick come in and augment things and dress things accordingly. We always chose what locations that looked a little battered and weathered and just felt that coastal influence and just felt as kind of the, the hope was that the look of the movie would was sort of as analog and practical as the practical effects would be so that they, it feels like it's all gelling and that when watching it, it's a very

10:28 tactile in camera kind of movie.

10:32 Speaking of effects and also the look, I don't get to say this too often, but who did your corpse work? Cause it looks really good.

10:39 Yeah.

10:39 So that's a great question. So there's two sides to this. The, the, all of the corpse bodies, like at the body farm, um, Those are done by a guy named Eric Wilkinson who lived, lives and works in a story Oregon where we shot the film. He, my, my brother, Mike, who was also a producer on the film met him and Eric used to work at haunted houses and worked on films and things.

11:05 And he's just an incredibly talented artist who for especially like dark arts and he'll take like bones and cobble things together with string and rope and plaster and just He's one of those guys that's just like studied every element of special effects and just knows how to bring cool artistic pieces to life. And I've done some skeleton corpsing in the past for the headhunter where we take plastic bones and you paint them and you stain them.

11:33 And Eric, whatever he would do, like just completely blew our stuff out of the water. So he made all of the corpses for the body farm, all the bones, he made the bones on the There's a great shot in the movie where we tilt up along some bones that are on a slab in the body farm office. Those are all plastic, like medical grade bones that he ages and sands down all the seams and sands off a little serial numbers and everything to make them look real.

12:03 And then the other corpse, the main like Peter Stump corpse that was done by Patrick McGee, who did all the werewolf stuff as well. So he did that and it was pulled from a life cast off of a gentleman named Graham Mackey. And Graham was the physical form for that. And he came in, they was fully nude.

12:24 They did the whole life cast and then they punched all the hair and painted that thing. And so, yeah, that, that thing was again, another work of art and it was fully articulate. You could bend the joints and, in the knees and it stretch its head and it's got a skeleton inside of it there are.

12:43 So many moving parts to a movie and i'm curious what was your biggest challenge making this one.

12:48 But you would think that it would have been the creature stuff or the effect stuff which is a challenge however we had so much time to plan that out in advance and we had patrick mcgee and his team Working with us on it. So I wouldn't, I don't actually default to that being the biggest challenge. The stuff that was the biggest challenge to me was the scenes.

13:10 There's a few of them in the movie where we have the full cast all sort of sitting around and dissecting information. And those scenes were the ones that made me the most nervous because you have all the cast. So there's just everything that goes into that. If you've got five or six people in the same set, all the costume decisions and wardrobe and all that stuff. For the police procedural and medical side of things, especially for Deborah, there's a lot of like mumbo jumbo that they have to remember in these big monologues with dates and names and locations and then forensic terminology for Deborah. Plus then the blocking in these little sets and locations and they're not flyaway walls. It's real. We're in like real buildings.

13:53 So you like you're stuck in that the whole crew's got to fit into this space. That's the stuff as a director that kept me, that made me a little bit more nervous is just making sure that we got everybody into the right places and that made sense for their characters in those scenes. And and I think the time too, when probably there's just more of a spotlight on me in those moments rather is when there's the creature stuff, it's like there's 16 puppeteers and if I don't know how it works, so it's kind of, it's on them a little bit. Whereas those are like, everyone turns to the director for the blocking side of things.

14:25 When was the first time you got to see this with an audience?

14:29 First time with an audience was at the premiere at Fantastic Fest a couple weeks ago. We never tested it. We showed screeners and cuts of the movie, but we never did it in a theater setting and with a crowd, which we should have. I wish that we would have done that because I think it would have been very valuable.

14:48 So yeah, first time was in Austin, Texas.

14:52 That's fantastic. How did it play?

14:55 It played in three theaters simultaneous. So I can only speak to the theater that we were in, but you can just, you can tell a little bit like the, the energy and certainly some, some claps from the transformation. And then just talking to people afterwards, like there was, you know, some people there that I value their opinion of.

15:12 So when they gave me a hug and said like, great work, I was like, okay, I think we're, I think we pulled it off, but you never know. And still, even now, like the people that see it or, the diehard horror fans. And once it reaches the masses on shutter and DVD and beyond, it just layers to the types of people in the crowds and the reach that movies have. And you just never know how the perception will change over time.

15:37 Is the plan now release it on shutter and let the world see it?

15:41 Yeah. So on October 23rd, the movie comes out on shutter. And prior to that, if you live near an Alamo draft house on October 20th, they're doing screening it theatrically. And, uh, Hopefully if, if people buy tickets and go see it and like it, that they'll extend that. So yeah, October 23rd is where our train is headed full steam ahead.

16:05 What are you doing next?

16:06 Do you know? Yeah, I've actually already shot it. We got very lucky and, but it was very stressful to sort of have cycle in this film overlap, but it was another script that while working on cycle, uh, During the pandemic, there was times where we were trying to get the financing together for Psychical and there was a gap.

16:24 And so we worked on another script with a writer named Jackson Murray. And it's called, the script is called Overseer. The film has been announced as Override. Stars Maria Bakalova and Frank Grillo. And it's something I've always wanted to do, which is a sci-fi movie. So it's Death Stranding meets Halo for any gamers out there. I love like edge of tomorrow and starship troopers and war hammer and doom and these like hard sci-fi big suits and big guns and that sort of that kind of world. But it's a very small sort of soulful survival story in episode of love, death and robots set in that hardened planet environment.

17:06 So it's really cool. And we're just, working on the post-production for it now so we don't have a release date yet probably maybe next year sometime definitely not this year.

17:17 I'm just looking forward to when you actually get to take over the critters franchise.

17:22 So am i you and me both i would love to do that that is a dream project i know exactly what i would do i have concept art made for it and i've got a whole plan if the door ever opens where.

17:33 Is a good place for people to keep up with you in the.

17:35 Movie My most active on Instagram. So just at Jordan Downey, my full name on Instagram is where I am, uh, where I keep people posted on anything going on with the release of this film and certainly with anything going forward.

17:49 Jordan, thank you so much. This was so nice talking with you and such a great film.

17:53 Thank you, Mike. Thanks for having me. And I've, I really appreciate it. And I admire your physical media collection that you have in your background as well.

18:06 Is pure and says his prayers at night can change to a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the full moon shining bright.

19:35 Thank you. Thank you.