SPIDEY TENSE

STING

Abig-ass spider feeds on everyone in an apartment block? It’s no laughing matter…

Charlotte (Alyla Browne) and Sting get acquainted

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.’

While some wide shots use VFX to show the giant spider scuttling across ceilings and walls, mostly it’s Taylor’s creature that’s stalking and devouring. Sting is no Eight Legged Freaks-style comedy. It has an R-rating for ‘violent content, bloody images and language’. ‘That sounds like my year-seven school report,’ he laughs, before turning serious. ‘Any horror filmmaker who makes a film PG should be shot for cowardice. Horror is an R-rated medium. It was important to have a scene where a spider crawls up a woman’s face, into her mouth and into her stomach.’

‘There’s nothing more gratifying than shoving a 100lb spider in an actor’s face’

KIAH ROACHE-TURNER

Quite. But you also need characters you care about. ‘I’m basically [Charlotte’s stepdad] Ethan [Ryan Corr], but instead of a filmmaker, he’s a comic-book artist,’ he explains. ‘I have a stepdaughter. So it’s all very personal. The arc that I wanted was where a stepfather gets to the end and says, “I love you,” and she says, “I love you,” back. In the movie, it takes 96 minutes. In my life, it took years until it happened – and it was a wonderful moment.’

STING OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 31 MAY.