Animal Heart
The Story
In the near future…
40-year-old video game artist Caroline desperately wants to get pregnant. After an expensive designer embryo fails to implant, she’s left devastated and broke. An online tip leads her to Chase, a gentle man offering to donate his sperm for the sake of altruism, but only if she’ll spend her pregnancy on his remote organic farm and abandon her hormones implants or monitoring gadgets. Chase is passionate about how nature can provide solutions to humanity’s many problems. What better solution to the fertility crisis than natural methods?
At the farm, Caroline is surprised by the warmth of Chase’s extended family and quickly bonds with his shy 6-year old daughter, Audrey, who’s mother is mysteriously absent. She suddenly has something she never dreamt of: the possibility of a whole new family. But her pregnant body starts displaying strange symptoms: her senses sharpen, fur sprouts, her teeth elongate, and she loses control. After an incident makes her an obvious danger to her new family, she knows she must escape.
In the woods, she finds something she never imagined: Chase waiting beside a caged lion-woman hybrid! This is Audrey’s mother, the result of one of Chase’s grafting experiment gone wrong. He confesses he secretly grafted a small amount of lion onto Caroline as well, but promises this time it will go better. Horrified, she runs away, only to go into labor and deliver a stillborn hybrid human-lion cub. Injured and in shock, she consumes the placenta and lets her primal instincts surge. She hunts Chase through the forest, eventually leaving him at the mercy of his own monstrous creation, who consumes him. Back at the farm, Caroline buries her cub, removes her graft, and escapes with Audrey.
She begins a new life—one where she’s a mother, and undeniably, defiantly human.
The plan
Animal Heart is a sci-fi horror feature film that will shoot in Spring 2026, with a festival premiere and distribution in 2027.
We’re focused on an arthouse horror audience, primarily composed of millennials, that want to engage with female-driven body horror films dealing with deeply personal issues. We’ll the submit the film to top genre festivals, such as Fantasia, Sitges, and Fantasic Fest.
Visually inspired by the bright folk horror of Midsommar, the body horror of The Substance, and the social urgency of Get Out, Animal Heart promises to be a film that compels audiences to ask one of the most important questions of our age: what makes us human?
Sahra Bhimji
Writer/Director
Deep experience as a screenwriter, director, and creative collaborator with short films screening all over the world, including the London Short Film Festival, San Francisco Indie Film Festival, and Seoul Green Film Festival. Tenured professor of Film Production at Diablo Valley College.
The lionesses
Ipsheeta Furtado
Producer
Tech founder with over a decade of experience in venture-backed fintech startups as well as a writer and theater artist.
Jeff Allard
Producer
Jeff has produced over 20 films which in total have grossed over $250 Million. Jeff is most well-known for Executive Producing THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2003 & 2006) alongside Michael Bay (Transformers), and for the critically acclaimed family comedy, PING PONG SUMMER which starred Academy Award winner Susan Sarandon and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival before its theatrical release.
Anna Robertson
Associate Producer
With over a decade of experience in production, Anna has worked on Hollywood films such as Bumblebee, Solo: A Star Wars Story, and Venom and produced shoots for clients like NBC Sports, Wells Fargo, and GQ.
Maria Léon
Line (Lion?) Producer
More than 15-years of production experience in broadcast television, marketing videos, award winning documentaries, short and feature films.
Why now?
We need women’s voices. For the past 20 years, women make up under 15% of all directors (of the top 100 movies each year). Without women’s voices behind the camera, fewer female characters end up with speaking roles in front of the camera as well. According to USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, women characters account for less than one third of all speaking characters on screen, a number which has stubbornly persisted for more than twenty years.
Women’s reproductive health matters. At a time when women’s bodily autonomy is under attack, we need stories about the importance of reproductive freedoms. Furthermore, the United States is in a maternal health crisis, with by far the highest maternal mortality rates in the industrialized world.
Horror’s box office success: While film is a high risk investment with no guarantee of success, horror is the most likely profitable genre.
The Horror audience is just the right age: Horror fans are largely between 25-44 years old, an audience naturally curious about stories of reproductive health, and familiar with IVF. Additionally, the visual tone of the film integrates video game design, popular with this age bracket.
