The Cycle‘s biggest reveal is that Peter Stump (David Myers Gregory) never really abandoned his family, at least not in the way his daughter spent 36 years believing he did. Peter was cursed, infected after crossing paths with a caged creature aboard a boat at sea, and he walked out on Meg (Deborah Ann Woll) and her mother, Joni (Gretchen Corbett), to protect them from what he became under the full moon. He spent the years that followed in hiding, recording his condition and searching for a cure, and when none came, he took his own life. But death didn’t end anything. The curse doesn’t need a living host, which explains why the “third body” at the film’s opening crime scene was so strangely preserved, and why insects wouldn’t go near it: Peter’s corpse had been rising as the creature, killing, and reverting back into a dead man by sunrise. The mother and daughter found mauled at the start of the film were simply its latest victims.
READ MORE: Read our full review of The Cycle
Who Survives at the End of The Cycle?
Meg and Marks (Jeffrey Donovan) make it out alive, but Marks’ son Ian (Will Hochman) does not, a loss that quietly mirrors Peter’s story: one father tried to protect his child by staying close, the other by staying away. With help from Lou Bishop (Carl W. Crudup), a survivor of a 1991 attack who still feels every transformation, the police figure out that the creature will return to Peter’s old house. In the basement, Meg and Marks find a cage Peter built for the night his body would wake up without him there to stop it. Meg climbs inside as bait, and Marks gets its electrical rig working, shocking both himself and the creature. It isn’t enough to finish the job, and the creature escapes to the beach, where Meg follows it alone, baits it into attacking her, and impales it with a boat hook as the sun comes up. In the morning light, it reverts to Peter’s body, and as he falls, his hand comes to rest on her shoulder, seemingly the goodbye she never got as a child.
READ MORE: 10 Horror Movies Like The Cycle
What Does the Final Scene of The Cycle Mean?
The film jumps ahead a year to find Meg and Marks with Peter’s body chained up, running experiments and injecting it with something the film never identifies. Meg didn’t kill the curse; she only survived one night of it, and since the corpse will keep rising every full moon, she has essentially inherited her father’s life’s work.
