The film stars Keke Palmer, Amaury Nolasco, Parker Young, Joey Lauren Adams, Elizabeth Gillies, Paul Iacono, Thorsten Kaye and Jeremy Sumpter and the synopsis goes like this: When plans for a weekend vacation hit a dead end, a group of close-knit friends find themselves stranded in unfamiliar territory, pursued by a menacing, blood thirsty predator. Holed up in an isolated cabin, tensions mount as long-buried secrets are revealed. As the body count rises, the group must put their differences aside and fight for survival.
“I met with [Drew Barrymore’s] Flower Films because they want to start producing original horror movies,” Simmons, who previous helmed The Monkey’s Paw and Husk, tells Shock. “They had a script, and when I came in to meet with them about it, we realized pretty quickly that we all wanted the same thing: to make something fun and old school. That’s what appealed to me immediately. The script was refreshingly simple and felt like a cool throwback to the movies I grew up watching, aside from also being a creature feature which I’ve been missing a lot lately. So between that and hitting it off with the team already involved, I was over-the-moon to be brought on board.”
On the FX side of things, the film’s threat was created by FX vet Gary Tunnicliffe (Feast, Piranha 3DD). “One of the highlights of Animal‘s development was creating the creature. [Writers] Thommy Hutson – who’s responsible for Never Sleep Again and a slew of amazing horror documentaries – and his writing partner Catherine Trillo intentionally left a lot of room in the script for the creature to become whatever we wanted,” said Simmons. “I got to bring Gary Tunnicliffe on board, which was exciting because we hadn’t collaborated since HUSK. He’s a wealth of knowledge, as well as a veteran of the genre, so he and I had endless conversations about different predators and influences and ideas. We learned doing Husk that we think alike and have similar taste, so it was a blast melding brains again and thinking through creature ideas. What emerged is pretty threatening.”
Check out the clip below and, again, look for Animal on the 17th!
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