Night Howl

Director Colin Minihan keeps it in the family with gonzo horror-comedy Coyotes

- MATT MAYTUM

ON A DARK NIGHT IN THE Hollywood Hills, one influencer gets more than she bargained for when taking her small, Instagram-friendly pooch for a walk in the savage (in all senses of the word) cold open to Colin Minihan's horror-comedy Coyotes. It's a statement of intent for how the film is going to sink its teeth into certain LA types with gory relish and over-the-top humour.

The setup was familiar terrain for the director. “I actually lived under the Hollywood sign, on a street called Beachwood Canyon, for many years,” he tells Red Alert. “There’s a lot of coyotes out there. I’d be taking a dog out for a walk at midnight and I would get stalked by one, here and there. They get pretty brazen...”

Not that the film – in which one household, inhabited by an ambitious comic-book artist and his family, is besieged by a particularly determined pack of coyotes while a wildfire rages outside – is a particularly serious beast. Its slobbery tongue is firmly in its cheek, with Minihan explaining, “I knew I wasn’t going to do the Spielberg Jaws thing” when it comes to making people scared of the animals in real life.