**World Premiere – Sundance Film Festival 2023**
“an impressive, confident feature debut for several key talents” – Hollywood Reporter
“stylish, fascinating coming-of-age story” – Bloody-Disgusting
“A sleek, sensuous debut” – Variety
Paramount Global Content Distribution will release the horror, romance film MY ANIMAL in select Theaters on September 8, 2023 and on Digital September 15, 2023. The film had its World Premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim.
MY ANIMAL is a supernatural genre-bending love story starring Bobbi Salvör Menuez (“Euphoria”), Amandla Stenberg (Bodies Bodies Bodies), Heidi von Palleske (Rabid), Cory Lipman (The Apprentice), Charlie & Harrison Halpenny, Joe Apollonio (“Betty”), Scott Thompson (“Fubar”), Dean McDermott (“Pretty Hard Cases”) and Stephen McHattie (“Essex County”). The film was written by Jae Matthews and directed by Jacqueline Castel – both marking their feature film debut.
SYNOPSIS: Bobbi Salvör Menuez (Euphoria) and Amandla Stenberg (Bodies Bodies Bodies) ignite in this genre-bending supernatural love story. Tormented by a hidden family curse, Heather is forced to live a secluded life on the outskirts of a small town. When she falls for the rebellious Jonny, their connection threatens to unravel Heather’s suppressed desires, tempting her to unleash the animal within.
DIRECTORS STATEMENT:
MY ANIMAL is a story about inheritance: of what gets passed through our lineage and how that defines us as individuals. It is also a story about first love and how that can serve as a catalyst for radical change, revealing what we most need and what most needs healing within us.
Like Heather, I understand the quiet despair and isolation of being an outsider in a small town, and of rebelling against it in youth only to discover that the most treasured and distinctive aspects of my selfhood derive from the very things I attempted to reject. What made me different also defined and ultimately transformed me.
In Jae Matthew’s screenwriting, I found the pain and joy of our mirrored adolescent struggles, our complex family relations, and the difficulty of navigating our earliest and most formative relationships. The real battle we each waged in youth, and the one Heather’s character must also face, is finding the courage of self-acceptance and self-expression. Through the struggles of these characters we encounter what works and what does not in the quest for identity, authenticity, and self-actualization, and the courage we must summon in the face of personal crisis and discrimination. This classical, outsider framework translates beautifully to the mythology of the werewolf.
In MY ANIMAL, I invite the viewer to get lost in the otherness of Heather Anderson. In so doing, I not only compel the audience to feel connected to a character who at first may appear to have little in common with them, but also to learn the same lessons that she does: only by embracing the traits that make us outcasts, and even subject to scorn, do we learn to become fully ourselves.
