The Hard Truths of Horror: Ethan Embry, Li Jun Li and Director Michael P Jann Connect to ‘Alma & the Wolf’

It should be unanimously understood that the true greats in the acting business are those who constantly challenge themselves. Naturally, there is room for those who play similar characters in all they do, but the greats, the icons, the ones you want to watch regardless of project are those who are chameleons. Those who can go from teen everyman in the last death throes of 90s teen movies to indie horror icon. Those who can play a madame at the height of Hollywood’s silent era to a recovering alcoholic preoccupied with a supernatural threat. Those like ‘Alma & the Wolf’ co stars Ethan Embry and Li Jun Li.

Embry and Li represent so much of what the business has to offer. Embry is a survivor - a workhorse having lasted more than 30 years in the business. Li may very well represent an important piece of the future of this business, working with big name directors such as Damian Chazelle or with Ryan Coogler on this year’s popular thriller Sinners. When an actor takes on so many different types of projects, or puts on so many metaphorical skins when playing these characters, the challenge has to be finding a way these skins fit - finding the truth of things.

Embry, Li and director Michael Patrick Jann recently sat down with FilmSpeak to discuss finding that truth. No easy task, not simply because of the confines of the profession, but stemming from the fact that Alma & the Wolf, to put it lightly, is a genre-mosaiced, mind-bender of a film. This wolf’s cry is far from that of Embry’s days as a bright-eyed teen in films such as Can’t Hardly Wait and Empire Records, in this film, he plays a sullen, sunken eyed Deputy who is trying his best to piece together a broken life. 

When asked about those iconic eyes, and how they often convey such joy and such pain in any given moment, (a skill he’s had for three decades), Embry begins to talk about those two emotions on the opposite end of the spectrum. 

“I value being a father greatly. I have a son, I have a grandson.” Embry pauses a moment to chuckle and let the latter fact sink in a little. “Yeah, a grandson. So I have a very strong attachment to parenthood, and in parenthood, both joy and pain become familiar. You have extreme joy, but things do hurt. There's guilt and there's mistakes, so I identified with those aspects of the story. That's the first thing I always do when I read something - I find [some aspect] in me, and then put whatever that is straight to the front.”

It’s one of the most unique aspects of Embry’s career, where he led himself down a path towards horror films such as Alma. Embry also had a short stint on The Walking Dead, Devil’s Candy, and has been cast in the Scream franchises next instalment. Yet he’s not alone in that regard, as his costar, Li, especially in 2025 has become known as a bit of a scream-queen in her own right. “I think films like these find me” Li admits.

“I love the ability of playing wildly different roles. I want to be a versatile actress, and I don't ever want to be typecast, not because I'm Asian, that's already a battle that we've had to fight for a long time, but I want to be able to perform in a way that it absolutely defies all sorts of categories. And they really find me so if a project has a role that I find intriguing, and where the creatives are also, you know, fans of mine, then I'm game, and they it just so happens that there's a few horror, specifically sinners and this one back to back, being a little bit in the horror genre, even though I don't think either films are really about horror, as Ethan says, Alma is a comedy. It is. It's a comedy. But I really think both films are really about the human condition and what one does when the stakes are heightened. And I think that's all the more interesting, because I think horror is really essentially us humans being put in a position where we have to make life and death decisions.”

Seemingly all those involved in Alma were on the same page, talking of the extreme emotions and the highs and lows of the human experience. While they may try to merely explain that as part of the horror genre, from this writer’s perspective, they are doing the film a disservice. There are dozens of horror films created every year that don’t tap into anything related to the human experience at all. Not only is that a testament to the performances within Alma, as mentioned, the film does not merely sit neatly in one box, it is an amalgam of several genres. Whatever the audience may experience is owed to the directorate behind the film as well.

Written by actor Abby Miller (Justified’s ‘Ellen May’), the script of Alma must have been one of the most interesting reads for anyone interested in the project. Director Jann adits he “loved that there was a central psychological truth” in the writing.

“I think the end result is a movie that is unlike any other horror, while still like treading across the horror genre. We tried to get the pleasure and the scares and the characteristics of folk-horror or body-horror or monster movies, or a John Carpenter movie, or a David Cronenberg movie, and a little bit of all of that in there, because I felt I had license to do all those things”. Jann also calls it a “genre breaker” more than a genre-bender. “By the end of it, it takes all of those conventions and actually snaps them. For the viewer it's ‘this’ kind of movie, and then it goes and then it takes another left turn. There's all kinds of stuff going on in it that are pieces of other horror genres. In the end, it's important for the audience to know that there is a reason. Like, it's not just a random sort of traipse through things - it's an investigation of the nature of horror as it goes forward in all of its facets. So horror is a kind of genre where it's presented to the audience, truths, realities that are otherwise not easily assimilated, or experienceable. Horror turns these experiences into a form for us to process narratively things that are too awful to really experience without a filter.”

One cannot help but feel the tremendous respect Jann and the cast have for what the genre can do or convey. As mentioned, Li, who has a great back-to-back double-bill in Sinners and now Alma certainly loves the genre. Li however has also become an amazing ambassador for the medium as a whole. Working with auteur-icons such as Damian Chazelle or Ryan Coogler, she has been in films that, much like Alma are made by pure students of cinema. They are made not just as films, but for film. Is there a danger of every going to deep into the cinematic rabbit-hole however? Is there a danger of making films for film lovers rather than the casual movie goer? Li certainly has a one very concise thought on the subject.

“I think telling a good story will take care of the rest. Without a good story, nobody will care whether or not you made it for film lovers or not.”

‘Alma and the Wolf’ is available on demand now.


For the full interviews with Director Michael P Jann and stars Ethan Emby & Li Jun Li, click below: