Decal Releasing
Writer-director Colin Minahan, who specializes in horror-festival favorites like It Stains the Sand Red and What Keeps You Alive, described his 2025 movie Coyotes as “environmental horror grounded in realism.” So I guess we should start by talking about that.
I live in southern California: yes, coyotes are a thing here. They’re edge predators, meaning that they prefer to live close to human communities where they can find easy pickings like garbage and dog food and also your dog.
After the 2025 fires, a lot of their preferred prey got burned out so they started exploring. Which is why you might see one loping past a strip mall in the early light of dawn.
I say this up front because if you depend on Mr. Minihan’s movie to satisfy your curiosity about these animals, you’re going to leave hungry. Coyotes doesn’t pretend to be a David Attenborough documentary.
Whether it succeeds at what it’s trying to be is a different question.
Coyotes sits in familiar low-budget horror territory: a dwindling group of terrified survivors barricade themselves in somebody’s house until the creatures find a way in. First they use dog flaps; then they learn how to open doors. This is only one of many swipes from Jurassic Park. Also Arachnophobia, Tremors, Alien, Night of the Living Dead, Jaws, even the Jaws ripoff Grizzly. Early in the film, Night of the Living Dead is playing on the television, a bit of lampshade hanging that was probably intended to read as homage.
The movie begins in the time-honored way, with a blonde club girl (Katherine McNamara) and her Chihuahua getting offed by unseen predators: technically, she’s killed by the Uber Black SUV she called in, and the coyotes finish the job. Making her clueless and self-obsessed makes it okay to laugh at her dismemberment.
Apparently Minihan also thinks that killing small nervous dogs is a hoot. Its name was Gigi.
Shift focus to a local family: Justin Long (Scott) and Kate Bosworth (Liv) are Dad and Mom, with Mila Harris as daughter Chloe and a Scottish Terrier called Charlie. Scott is a writer who’s too busy writing masterpiece novels to notice his family drifting away from him. He’s also afraid of the wa—sorry, he faints at the sight of blood, which means he’s afraid to intervene when the shark I mean coyotes invade Amity–sorry Hollywood Hills. Okay, we have our arc.
Like everyone who lives in the canyons, Scott and Liv have an asshole neighbor. Trip (Norbert Leo Butz) owns a lot of guns and spends a lot of money on sex workers. One of them is Julie, played by Brittany Allen (best remembered as Popclaw, the second-rate super with literally killer thighs in The Boys). There’s also a wild-eyed exterminator named Devon (Keir O’Donnell), who’s set up to be our Quint but winds up getting tossed aide like Jurassic Park’s Muldoon.
The windstorm that kicks off the drama—and the wildfire that ends it—were reportedly not part of the original script. That was an inspiration Minihan had after the L.A. fires in early 2025, which helps to clarify a couple of things: one, this movie came together seriously fast; and two, when human tragedy strikes, Colin Minihan sees cinematic gold.
Apart from the lack of Airbnbs, the set definitely looks like the canyons, even though it was shot in Bogota, Colombia. The buildings are realistic; the coyotes are not. They’re a combination of stock footage, puppets, and CGI: the same shot of a glowering coyote lumbering slowly toward the camera gets cut-and-pasted a dozen times, with varying degrees of blood on its muzzle.
Low-budget effects are not something you hold against a movie if the script is good and the actors are meeting the moment.
The problem with Coyotes is that it’s hard to know what that moment is supposed to be at any given moment. Minihan mostly aims for horror-comedy in the vein of Tremors, with occasional nods to the horror-tragicomedy of An American Werewolf in London and the eco-horror-tragicomedy of Twister. But he never dips his toe too deep in any pool.
One minute he’s giving us the science lowdown on how wildfires shift predator populations, and the next we’ve got coyotes that know how doorknobs work.
For every classic grindhouse-gore effect—like Trip getting the flesh stripped from his exposed skeleton and still somehow remaining alive—we have a moment of Spielbergian pathos playing off that most Spielbergian of themes, the inattentive father. Then it’s straight back to coyotes acting like zombies.
Occasionally Minihan pulls it off.
In the midst of a massed coyote assault, Scott improvises a countermeasure in his garage. Realizing that this probably isn’t going to work, he calls his wife and daughter on their Hello Kitty walkie-talkie to say that he knows he’s been a terrible father and things will be different from now on if they survive this: when they survive this. His moment of courage and vulnerability is interrupted by Liv saying she didn’t hear a word. Just krrrrrhhhh static.
It’s funny and real and it works. Then we find out the countermeasure is a tank made of baby gates and his daughter’s tricycle.
Dan O’Bannon would have known how to pluck the absurdity out of this situation without losing the terror. George Romero would have brought the wit. Spielberg would have nailed the emotion. The problem isn’t that Minihan isn’t any of these great filmmakers. It’s that he tries to be all of them at once.
The cast do their best to play whatever they’re handed.
As a lady of the evening (her character’s preferred euphemism), Brittany Allen is a fun hot mess. Kate Bosworth has the thankless job of Mom Trying to Make Dad Be a Man. Justin Long is still carrying too much of his Galaxy Quest fanboy vibe to make him believable as a father, let alone a workaholic—but he’s a credible beta male and knows how to yelp and faint.
“This isn’t Jaws,” Colin Minihan said in an interview (No. It is not). “I’m not trying to convince you to stay out of the ocean.” He was answering critics who complained that he shamelessly exploited an ecological crisis to make a cheap horror film. He went on to say that he actually loves coyotes.
Love might be a bit far for most people—they really will kill Rover and Mr. Mittens if you’re not careful—but yeah, any animal you can scare away with a New Year’s Eve noisemaker is not much of a threat. Which makes me wonder why he chose to use them for a horror movie. They just don’t inspire the visceral terror that we get from sharks or snakes or even wolves. Maybe all the good predators have been picked over? It’s hard to imagine Mayor Vaughn telling Brody, “You yell ‘coyote’ and you’ve got a panic on your hands on the Fourth of July.”
The coyotes walk among us.
They make a horrifying racket after a kill and it’s spooky when their eyes glow in the beam of your flashlight late at night. You don’t want to leave any garbage cans out for them to knock over. On Saturday mornings they strap Acme rockets to their backs.
But they’re not scary. In the final analysis, neither is Coyotes. Was it really worth dragging in the wildfires for that?
Extras include a featurette.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login