Backcountry and Pyewacket director Adam MacDonald is back this year with Out Come the Wolves, a survival horror movie set for theatrical and VOD release on August 30. MacDonald reteams with Backcountry star Missy Peregrym on the thriller, this time pitting the actor against a metaphorical and physical pack of wolves.
Out Comes with Wolves follows Sophie (Missy Peregrym), who brings her fiancé (Damon Runyan) to her secluded cabin deep in the wilderness to meet her male best friend (Joris Jarsky). While there, tensions between the two men rise prior to their setting off on a deer hunt that descends into the darkest side of nature, leaving a truly terrifying trail of horror. The screenplay was written by Enuka Okuma with the story by Joris Jarsky, Adam MacDonald and Enuka Okuma.
Unlike her character in Backcountry, Peregrym’s Sophie is self-sufficient, confident, and nature savvy. But Peregrym’s presence and the deep woods setting does beg the obvious question: are Backcountry and Out Come the Wolves companion pieces?
“Well, in my own mind, they are, right?” MacDonald says. But the answer is more complicated than that; Pyewacket is part of what MacDonald originally envisioned as a horror trilogy.
He explains, “My dream was to make a trilogy. Originally, it was about women surviving extreme circumstances or the backdrop of the woods. So that was the Pyewacket with the woods, and Backcountry and Out Come The Wolves, they all opened similarly. I don’t know if you take the time to notice, but they close very similarly, and they open very similarly. It’s just my love affair with the woods, and I wanted to make that the backdrop. This one, exactly what you said, is that she was not capable in [Backcountry], so what is it like when she is capable? Of course, this is the cousin to that movie. If you liked Backcountry, I’m hoping you’ll like this and being like, oh, we’ll take it to another level in a way with some more action.”
Joris Jarsky in Out Come the Wolves. Photo credit: IFC Films
The origin story behind Out Come the Wolves only deepens the connection between MacDonald’s films.
The filmmaker explained, “To be honest, this movie’s been in the works for a decade. It was under another title at first. It was slightly different in terms of the tone of the movie, slightly different. But Joris Jarsky said after Backcountry came out, ‘Oh, I’d like to work together. I have an idea of a comedy with a third wheel.’ I was like, ‘Well, I’m not that interested in a comedy, but what if we make it a triad or something? Or unfulfilled love between two people and all that stuff, and introduce some wolves in the woods?’”
“Then came Enuka Okuma, the writer,” MacDonald continued. “We got together and talked about it. She wrote the script, and we’ve been in development since then. I went to Missy first, and she was interested. She wanted to do it. She wanted to come back into that playground, but the script changed a little bit, and the title changed. Then, by the time we were set to shoot, she had wanted to do it so badly. She was ready to commit to the type of character that was finally finalized and the circumstances in the movie. But she had two children during the course of these ten years. So we were going to possibly shoot in the summer at one point, but she’d just had a baby.
“It was a lot of starts and stops, but we never gave up. We never gave up. But it is poetic, I think, where Backcountry was ten years ago. Ten years ago. It’s almost cheesy, like, oh, if there’s ever a ten anniversary for that movie, well, okay, let’s do one better; let’s make another one.”
One key difference, MacDonald emphasizes, is to expect a brisker pace in Out Come the Wolves. The filmmaker stresses this because he watched both Backcountry and Out Come the Wolves back-to-back, interested to compare his gory, violent animal attack scenes.
“I just wanted to make it honest. It wasn’t even on my mind when we were doing it because it would do a disservice to the Out Come the Wolves movie,” he tells Bloody Disgusting. “I know that Backcountry had a much slower burn and was more patient. I wanted to not do that. I wanted to do something that would quote-unquote, ‘be more commercial’ or more like Fury Road, where, when it goes, it goes. From the halfway point, if you watch the movie, it does not stop until the last shot, and that was my goal. I said, ‘The wolves will take care of themselves. They’ll do what they want.’ It’s funny because I have to be honest with you: A month ago, I watched them back to back. I never did it. I was like, ‘Oh, let me do this. Let me do this because I haven’t done it.’ I swear. And then I was like, ‘Okay.’ So I just watched the bear attack and I watched the wolf attack. I was happy. They both work. I don’t know which one’s better or worse. But it’s also the context, right?
“But I will say this about the attacks. Some people on set brought it up because some people knew Backcountry. They asked me, ‘What’s the difference?’ I said, ‘Well, to me, if you want to really break it down, Backcountry is the T-Rex, and this one’s the Velociraptors,’ basically.”
Black Spot FX ensures the animal encounters and survival horror are gruesome to capture the unforgiving aspect of nature. They had their work cut out for them on this film, with some effective prosthetic work. “It’s a lot,” MacDonald says of the team’s contributions to this film. “When they did Pyewacket, that’s when I first met them. Then they branched out, and they did Slasher, so we’ve been through so much together. There was a moment where they maybe couldn’t do the movie, but then they could, and everything worked out. What was tricky was that we shot the wolves in Alberta, and we shot everything else in Dundas Valley in Hamilton. The actors never met the wolves, so that was the hard part. Then they just came in, and we matched everything perfectly. You couldn’t tell over someone’s shoulder, the person grabbing the bow, that’s not Missy’s hand, that’s a stunt woman’s hand in Alberta.”
In Out Come the Wolves, nature is a leveler that leaves everything out in the open. A line of dialogue sums up this theme well, “Nature shows you who you are.” Nature isn’t just a force intrinsic to the film, but its filmmaker as well.
MacDonald explains, “I grew up in Laurentians, Quebec, an hour north of Montreal with my mother. I spent a great deal of time up there, but I love nature. I respect nature. I’m in awe. I’ve been to the Sahara Desert right in the middle near Siwa. It’s as beautiful as hiking in the Rockies in Alberta to the Appalachians in Quebec. I love a good pine forest. I mean, come on. I just love a northern pine forest, right? My relationship with nature is healthy that way. I think it helped me heal as well when I went through difficult times. Nature was a healer, but there’s also that other side to it. That’s why I love it. There’s a darkness to it too. It’s in fairy tales. The dark woods. The unknown. The primal. You can say what you want about yourself. I don’t care who you are in the city, but if you go get up there, you’re going to find out who you are in nature. It doesn’t lie, and that’s what I love about it. For real. It exposes people. It exposes who you are.”
Out Come the Wolves may be the final entry in MacDonald’s woods-set trilogy, but the filmmaker’s explorations in ecological horror are far from over. The director has one key project at the top of his wish list. When asked about whether he’d continue to venture deeper into wooded horror, Macdonald didn’t hesitate to answer. “Oh yeah. I want to remake Congo, given the chance. Of course. Cujo, maybe never. I don’t know if they want to do dogs ever again, but Congo, I think it’s about time that they bring that back up. A more grounded, gritty, intense version. But they’d be like, ‘Oh, we’re never going to do that because we have the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and everything. We’re not going to do another.’”
There’s room for Congo, I think.
“There’s room for Congo,” MacDonald agrees.