EightLegged Freak

The director of the Alieninfluenced Sting talks about his spider horror

- JACK SHEPHERD

RED ALERT HAS WOKEN UP EARLY to catch Kiah Roache-Turner on Zoom. No coffee has been drunk, but that doesn’t matter – the very first story the Australia-based filmmaker tells is terrifying enough to put even the most hardened horror fan on high alert.

“This has happened to me a couple of times,” he says with a grin. “I’ll wake up in the morning and I’ll pull my curtains apart, and there’ll just be a huntsman spider on the glass right in front of my face. I scream like a little girl. They are the size of your hand, but they aren’t as bad as funnel-webs, which are these massive, hairy things that can kill you.”

Gulp. No wonder Roache-Turner developed arachnophobia. Yet, rather than shy away from his fears, the writer/director has embraced them, making feature-length horror film Sting, about an alien spider that invades a New York apartment building and proceeds to take out the human inhabitants one by one.

“I’m kind of remaking Alien,” he says. “It’s just the perfect science fiction horror. It’s effectively a haunted house movie with a giant killer alien. There was always something spider-like about that Giger creation in Alien, it felt insectoid, and I wanted to make something that was a scary single-location horror, with one family.”