Arthouse Horror Flick COYOTE Releases Clip; Wins Awards

Here's a clip from an arthouse horror film that has been banned at some film festivals and has won awards at others in its first public screenings: controversial director Trevor Juenger's Coyote. The film stars Bill Oberst Jr. as an insomniac writer whose sleep-deprived hallucinations distort reality as paranoia drives him to extreme violence. The surreal shocker, which mixes arthouse and horror, is shopping for distribution and it's first public screenings have elicited strong reaction. 

Director Trevor Juenger tweeted last week from a festival, "Someone in the audience keeps yelling What Is This? and What Does It Mean? We're going to give him an aneurysm by film's end." Juenger says a college screening of Coyote was shut down in mid-film by an administrator citing "extreme violence" while another public screening in the director's hometown of St. Louis had to be cancelled when the theater owner refused to run the film due to "extreme content."

Coyote's IMDb page shows 27 reviews, all positive. The film's wins include Best Feature at the 2013 Unreal Film Festival in Memphis and three Feature Film Awards at Pollygrind Underground Film Festival 2013 in Las Vegas, including a Best Actor Award for Oberst.

Fans of the surreal and the extreme can decide for themselves once Coyote gets distribution. In the meantime, here's a clip that director Juenger says "may be my favorite sequence in the film," the moments before Oberst's character snaps completely.

Coyote from Trevor Juenger on Vimeo.