The upcoming horror movie Coyotes is about exactly what it sounds like: killer, vicious coyotes terrorize a family one night in Beverly Hills, and everyone is forced to fight for their survival at every turn. The film stars Justin Long and Kate Bosworth and is directed by Colin Minihan. The cast spoke with The Direct's Russ Milheim at Fantastic Fest 2025, where the movie premiered, to discuss how they made the killer coyotes authentic, believable, and scary.
The cast members and filmmakers we spoke to on the red carpet include Justin Long (Scott), Kate Bosworth (Liv), Mila Harris (Chloe), Brittany Allen (Julie), Katherine McNamara (Kat), and Colin Minihan (director, editor).
Coyotes will release in limited theaters on October 3, 2025. For another killer animal horror movie, make sure to check out Primate, which made quite the impression at Fantastic Fest 2025.
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- The Direct: "The movie is obviously about killer coyotes. On the day, what did you work across from? Because obviously, they weren't there. And then, what was that process of making it believable, authentic, and scary?"
Kate Bosworth: It was mostly Colin saying, like, and then a coyote is coming. A coyote is coming, okay? It's skulking across the room. And he'd be like, 'no the other way!' It was pretty much that. We didn't have, like, a tennis ball or anything like that. It was just calling, shouting out.
Justin Long: And then there's like, the fear as an actor, the actor fear of just being caught looking silly, and like, you don't know what you're doing. So that fear kind of helped the motivation of it. There's like, well, am I gonna look like a jackass? And there were some puppets. We used some puppets.
And, oh, man, I want to post this footage. There's some footage of Colin talking me through a coyote attack with our wonderful first AD, Philippe [on the last day of filming]. Philippe was, because it was a low-budget movie, and so we didn't have someone do it. So Philippe, the first AD, was puppeteering this, hand puppet...
And I was a little tired, but I was also like, it was one of those moments you think there's no way this is going to look good. This is gonna just be ridiculous. And, like, unintentionally funny, you know? And I'm like, writhing, but tired, and like, I know I'm in my head so phony looking. And Colin sent me the footage. This is Colin's genius. Is that the way he cut it and shot it? It was so frenetic that it looked good, but when you see it from a distance, like the B-roll footage. It's ridiculous. As an actor, it's horrifying.
Colin Minihan: It was super challenging to wrap my head around. Early on in prep, when I realized the movie was gonna go, I quickly learned from animal wranglers that coyotes are not like wolves. They're extremely timid creatures, and so the act of actually bringing one on set, never mind getting it to growl, is super challenging, and you'd have to, basically, the trainer would have to break the trust of the animal to do so, something that obviously no trainer is willing to do, and not something that I wanted to do.
So we built them. We had multiple puppets, hand puppets, essentially super hyper detailed that actors would interact with, and we had an animatronic on set that could be fought with, and then we used a huge CGI pipeline to basically fill in the rest, as well as some animals on set that resembled coyotes. So that was nice when we actually had the real animals on set. But it brings in a different element, for sure.
Mila Harris: Yeah, that kind of challenged me. I was like, how am I gonna pretend there's this giant monster coyote when it's not really there? But, funny story, we actually were taking—there were these huge life-size versions, but they actually got taken up at the airport because they looked so real.
So we ended up using these puppets. And it was really cool, actually. I was, like, talking to this puppet. It was really interesting. It was cool how I had to make it come alive. And I just envisioned in my head that there was a real monster there, and the paw really was there.
Brittany Allen: I've had a fair bit of practice with doing a lot of horror films, and rarely do you have the monster, the alien, the coyote, that you are actually supposed to be in great fear of in the room with you. It's often done in post. It kind of depends on the scene, but yeah, in this case, I tended to imagine something else that was a little bit more terrifying to me, and a little bit more we were shooting, this is going to sound we were shooting in Colombia, and I imagined that we were being, we had a bunch of people, drug lords coming. Okay, that sounds wrong, but you know, you use what you have.
Katherine McNamara: For me, it was a very different experience, because I didn't work with anyone else in the film. I was just there for one day. So, you know, thankfully, I've known Colin for a very long time, and Justin and Kate actually came to set that night. So, with all of their collective ideas, they sort of talked me through the tone and sort of where they had been at while they were filming. And I had the most fun being the girl who dies at the beginning. You get to take a lot of big swings that kind of really make a splash, hopefully.
Be sure to watch the full interviews from the Fantastic Fest red carpet here:
For those who need more fantastic action films, check out Sisu: Road to Revenge, which also premiered at Fantastic Fest 2025.
