Cry Wolf 2005 theatrical one-sheet poster at display scale against a near-black ground

The film this site is about

A million-dollar prize, a borrowed campus, and a killer nobody invented until they did

Jeff Wadlow won the Chrysler Million Dollar Film Festival with a short and spent the prize on a feature. He wrote it with Beau Bauman, shot it on the campus of the University of Richmond, and gave it to Rogue Pictures, which put it in theatres on 16 September 2005.

What he had was a slasher with almost no killing in it: eight boarding-school students invent a serial murderer to see how far a lie will travel, and then watch the lie start answering their messages.

Directed by Jeff Wadlow

Written by Jeff Wadlow and Beau Bauman

With Julian Morris, Lindy Booth, Jared Padalecki, Jon Bon Jovi, Anna Deavere Smith

Released Rogue Pictures, 16 September 2005 · PG-13 · 90 minutes

Start with the prize that paid for everything

Eight students invent a killer to see how far a lie will travel — and then it starts writing back.

Twenty-seven pieces on Cry_Wolf and on the year its old tagline named: the game, the campus, the ensemble, the release, and the 2016 films that took the same idea somewhere else.

The rules of Wolf, and why the film needed a phone

A parlour game gives the film its structure: one player is the wolf, everybody else lies, and the group votes somebody out each round. Wadlow’s addition was the handset. Instant messages and texts arrive on screen with no face behind them, which is the cheapest and most frightening special effect available in 2005 — and the reason the picture dates so precisely.

Brick Gothic-style chapel with a stone rose window and pointed spire finials

A vintage Sony cellular telephone with keypad standing upright against a dark background

Long empty dormitory corridor with rows of windows casting striped light on the floor

The wolf, as written

One player is the wolf and knows it.
Everybody may lie. The wolf must.
Each round the group votes one player out.
A player voted out says nothing further.
The wolf wins by being the last one nobody believed was lying.

Owen Matthews, the new boy, is the one who insists the rumour will be harmless. He is also the one nobody believes at the end, which is the fable the title comes from. How you play Wolf

Aesop, No. 210

The boy cried wolf twice for nothing.
The film is about the third time.

The fable is the whole plot in one sentence, and Wadlow never hides it: the credit sequence puts it on screen before a single student speaks. From Aesop to orange ski mask

University of Richmond collegiate Gothic exterior, late afternoon, adult crew member in foreground

Richmond, Virginia

The school in the film is a real school, and it is the reason it looks expensive

Westlake Preparatory Academy is the University of Richmond in Virginia — collegiate Gothic, red brick, a lake, and long covered walks that let a camera follow somebody for thirty seconds without a cut.

A first feature made for roughly a million dollars cannot build a campus. Borrowing one that already photographs like money is the single most consequential production decision in the picture. The Richmond section

Ninety minutes, eight frames

Two sports trophies with figurines of a batter and a runner sit on a shelf

Hands hold a bound screenplay titled "The Climb" among scattered papers and a typewriter

The Egyptian Theatre lit up at night with Sundance Film Festival signage, snow piled outside

Ticket counter and lobby entrance at Bekmambetov Cinema with movie posters visible

A video camera with flip-out screen recording a meeting room with a person seated at a table

Market research bar chart and revenue report papers with a pink pen on a dark surface

Adult figure silhouetted in a cinema auditorium, projector beam cutting the dark above them

Silhouette of a wolf and lone tree against a fiery sunset with birds flying overhead

Eight of the pieces on this site, in the order the film reaches them — competition, script, festival, campaign, label, weekend, audience, fable.Wikimedia Commons · Pexels

The piece to read first

Two Studios and the Shape of the Genre in 2016

By the end of 2016, A24 and Blumhouse had established opposite production philosophies for prestige horror — A24's auteur-slow, Blumhouse's fast-and-wide — and this piece uses the year's slate to show what each pole actually produced.

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