Demi Moore did a few horror movies early in her career, including Parasite and The Seventh Sign, as well as a “Tales from the Crypt” episode. This year, she’s the standout of Sundance midnight movie Corporate Animals, from Creep writer/director Patrick Brice.

Moore plays Lucy Vanderton in the horror-comedy, a domineering boss who gets her staff trapped in a cave on a team-building exercise. The group turns to cannibalism, and Lucy advocates for more killing when they run out of food.

“It was totally energizing,” Moore told us at the film’s Sundance premiere. “I felt full the entire time.”

Screenwriter Sam Bain and director Patrick Brice also spoke with Bloody-Disgusting at the festival. Bain confirmed he was indeed playing off Moore’s ‘90s tough-gal persona.

“Obviously what she is known for, what she does brilliantly is play these super tough women,” Bain said. “That’s sort of her stock and trade in that ‘90s period. There is that part of Lucy but we just wanted to push it all the way to being a sort of potential murderer psycho, which I don’t think she has played. That felt like the fun part, pushing that character to the nth degree.”

“Demi has kind of an inherent sense of vulnerability still even when she’s playing one of these tough characters that I think makes her really interesting for that part as opposed to someone that could be more maybe just relentlessly one-note antagonistic the whole time,” Brice added

“She’s terrorizing all these people around her but we also needed to make it so that she felt like a real person at the same time.”

No matter how bad things get, Lucy will never accept any blame. Her team is stuck in a cave, they just ate someone, and yet she’s still trying to motivate them to work together.

“She’s an extreme narcissist,” Brice explained. “She’s incapable of self-reflection. She has all these traits that are related to what you’d call now toxic masculinity but we were applying that to this woman in power and seeing what that did.”

Moore was actually not the first choice for the role of Lucy. Brice originally cast another famous ‘90s dynamo, but now it’s hard to imagine anyone but Moore as Lucy.

“We’d initially cast Sharon Stone but there was a scheduling conflict and she ended up having to drop out,” Brice said.

“It was really close to us shooting the movie so it was also a huge testament to Demi as a person for just being brave enough to jump into a movie that was this off the wall, but also how talented she is that she was able to just inhabit that part immediately.”

Watch for distribution and release news as it comes in.