Crew
Director – Colin Minihan, Screenplay – Tad Daggerhart & Nick Simon, Story – Tad Daggerhart, Daniel Meersand & Nick Simon, Producers – Ford Corbett, Josh Harris, Nathan Klingher & Jib Polhemus, Photography – Bradley Stuckel, Music – Brittany Allen, Visual Effects – Sugar Studios (Supervisor – Steven Ardal), Special Effects Supervisor – Felix Andres Villada, Makeup Effects – Anderson Rodriguez Vargas, Production Design – Jamie Luna. Production Company – Gramercy Park Media/Source | Management + Production, Ltd.
Cast
Justin Long (Scott), Kate Bosworth (Liv), Mila Harris (Chloe), Brittany Allen (Julie), Norbert Leo Butz (Trip), Keir O’Donnell (Devon), Katherine McNamara (Kat), Kevin Glynn (Tony), Norma Nivia (Sheila)
Plot
Scott brings in an exterminator to deal with rat problems in his home in the Hollywood Hills. He, his wife Liv and teenage daughter Chloe then find coyotes are lurking around the house. In the aftermath of a storm, the power in the area goes out. The coyotes then move in and begin to attack Scott and neighbours. As they shelter inside the house, the feral coyotes enter.
Colin Minihan first appeared as one half of the Canadian duo known as The Vicious Brothers, along with the unrelated Stuart Ortiz. The two had a moderate success with their Found Footage ghost story Grave Encounters (2011), as well as writing the sequel Grave Encounters 2 (2012) for a different director. They subsequently went on to make Extraterrestrial (2014). Following that, Colin Minihan went solo as director and has made a modest and increasingly wider acclaimed body of films with the unique and original zombie film It Stains the Sand Red (2016) and the murderous thriller What Keeps You Alive (2018), as well as he writing/producing Still/Born (2017), Spiral (2019) and Z (2019) and producing In Control (2017) for other directors.
Coyotes falls into being an Animals Attack film of which there have been a great many, covering most animal species. I am not aware of there having been any films about killer coyotes before this. However, in an adjacent field we have had a number of films about killer dogs from Dogs (1976) through The Pack (1977), Cujo (1983), The Breed (2006), The Pack (2015), Bullet Head (2017) and A Breed Apart (2025).
Coyotes doesn’t differ too much from the standard Animals Attack film, but for two things. One of these is that it takes place in the Hollywood Hills (although in actuality, the film has been shot in Colombia of all places). The other is that it is made with a considerable sense of humour just as much as it is work of horror. The results work quite appealingly.
Justin Long has emerged as a new face in this kind of indie, just off the beaten track horror film in recent years. He is perfectly well cast here as the slightly doofus husband thrust into a situation. Everybody in the film is on ball with their performances with Norbert Leo Butz proving rather hilarious as the coked-out neighbour. Brittany Allen (Colin Minihan’s partner in real life who has appeared in all of his films since Extraterrestrial, and here also composes the score) is fine in what is essentially a variant on the character she played in It Stains the Sand Red.
Minihan gets the mix of humour just right – the tone is set perfectly with the sarcastic prologue with Katherine McNamara as an airhead influencer who gets attacked while walking her dog and talking on her phone. There is a particularly hilarious scene early on where Justin Long and Kate Bosworth stumble about trying to explain the correct terminology for prostitute to daughter Mila Harris.
The other adept thing that Colin Minihan does is that Coyotes strikes a perfect balancing act between the sense of humour and the tension. The coyotes are wonderfully vicious and feral looking creatures and are invested with considerable ferocity whenever they appear. Minihan gets a good deal of tension with them prowling through the various houses and then attacking. At the same time, Minihan is constantly deflating this and/or the characters with humour. All to quite appealing results.
Trailer here