EXCLUSIVE
STING
Abig-ass spider feeds on everyone in an apartment block? It’s no laughing matter…
When Kiah Roache-Turner was a toddler, he was bitten in a sandpit by a big, black spider. An arachnophobe since, the Australian filmmaker’s endured many terrifying encounters with ‘spiders the size of a hand’, but one confrontation was especially scarring.
‘I used to work in an office, doing editing. I went to get a lens out of the cupboard and a huntsman fell on my face. I tore my shirt off and just screamed and screamed. Everybody was just looking at me. I was like, “A spider, a spider!” My mate Nevin is like, “Where?” I couldn’t find it.
I’m just standing there with my shirt off. This fucking spider made me look like a dickhead.’
Cut to 40 years later and Roache-Turner, director of the crazed Wyrmwood movies (think Mad Max fights zombies), is standing in James Wan’s office being told, ‘The trick to a good horror film [is] “single location, one family, one monster”,’ he recalls. And so he imagined a 12-year-old girl, Charlotte (Alyla Browne), making a pet of a small spider she names Sting, only for it to grow exponentially and escape into the air-conditioning ducts. Soon the pets in the apartment block start to go missing. And then the residents… ‘It’s my worst nightmare,’ grins Roache-Turner, who’s looking to move from ‘rip-roaring action-horror’ into ‘horror-horror’, saying, ‘I want to scare the pants off people.’ Starting with his actors. ‘I was so glad I was able to work with [visual effects supremo] Richard Taylor – he’s a god – and that Weta were able to build me a practical creature. There’s nothing more gratifying than to shove a 100lb spider in an actor’s face, and watch them actually scream for real.’
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