While there are still a few notable horror movies to come out before the year ends, with Robert Eggers’ Werwulf chief among them, the one to beat for the title of best horror movie of 2026 is Jordan Downey’s The Cycle.
Best described as a supernatural procedural (some reviews sum it up as Silence of the Lambs meets The Thing, but this comparison doesn’t do it justice), the film follows a forensic anthropologist called Meg (Deborah Ann Woll) as she’s called to investigate the corpse of her estranged father. She hasn’t heard from him since he abandoned her 36 years prior. Suddenly, his body shows up near a grisly murder site with seemingly no connection to it.
Saying more would ruin the many surprises The Cycle goes lengths to keep under wraps. Once they’re revealed, though, they hit like a series of lightning bolts that supercharge the remainder of the story. Raw horror imagery and impressive practical effects follow, paving the way for key developments that are simply jaw-dropping.
The Cycle is a great example of delayed gratification, something that some of the best procedurals manage to pull off to great effect. Director Jordan Downey (who directed 2018’s The Head Hunter) proves to have a strong grasp on pacing, dropping breadcrumbs often enough to keep audiences on high alert.
One thing that really stands out is Downey’s decision to show every gruesome thing in clear lighting. The gorier aspects aren’t hidden under heavy shadows or just partially shown here. On the contrary, dead bodies get a chance to show how badly they got it in their final moments. The make-up effects department understood how much storytelling the violence was meant to carry, so they made sure it stood out in detail.
The performances respond to this well. Deborah Ann Woll plays Meg like a scientist that struggles with the unexplained elements of the murders while never coming off as resistant to the stranger aspects of the case. She’s not stubborn, which lets her explore other possibilities characters of her type prefer to disregard in other movies. No time is wasted on getting the main character to painfully concede that something supernatural is operating behind the scenes.
Actor Jeffrey Donovan is another standout, turning in a strong performance as Officer Marks, a man who wants answers for reasons of his own. He plays a tough but reasonable cop that also approaches the murder case with an open mind, so long as the evidence points to a path that can’t be explained away by conventional means. It’s refreshing to get a figure of authority that isn’t there to undermine the main character or to annoyingly cast doubt on obvious instances of abnormal phenomena. Officer Marks is a more memorable character because of it.
Cinematographer Kevin Stewart makes great use of space and color palette. He sticks with grey tones that make blood splatter pop. Crime scenes look angry because of it. Whatever was responsible for the deaths wasn’t careful or well-organized. It was driven by a hunger for ultraviolence. Everything is laid out for the audience to see, which makes an already tense experience even more terrifying.
The Cycle finds success by knowing when to innovate and when to fall back on time-tested ideas. It pulls off an impressive balancing act that sees certain influences coursing through it without overwhelming the final product. Downey wanted to get at something different, something more unsettling. He convincingly achieves it, resulting in a horror movie that will certainly be talked about more as time passes.
The Cycle is currently streaming on Shudder.
