It should be clear by now that I am a sloppy sucker for animal attack movies. 2026 has seen a slew of bad to okay shark attack films, a terrible killer whale movie, and a solid hippo tale, but the year’s best entry in the animal attack subgenre remains Johannes Roberts’ Primate.
The film unleashes a rabid chimpanzee on a group of young adults partying in Hawaii, and it delivers genuine tension and thrills alongside some wonderfully gruesome carnage and kills. The chimp is a practical creation – a guy in a suit – and the combination of performance, direction, editing, etc. makes it easy to suspend disbelief and simply go along with the frightening ride.
Roberts is no stranger to the subgenre, having also directed both 47 Meters Down and its superior sequel, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged. (He also made the excellent The Strangers: Prey at Night, which makes Renny Harlin’s laughably bad sequel trilogy even more embarrassing for everyone involved.)
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Primate (2025)
Commentator: Johannes Roberts (co-writer/director), Walter Hamada (producer)
1. The opening cage assault was filmed three times – with three different actors – before they finally felt like they got it right with Rob Delaney and the faceless dummy.
2. The film originally opened with the introduction of the characters en route to the house, but early audiences were apparently unsure about the film’s tone. Insane. The fix was to move the cage scene to the very start so audiences would know it’s a scary horror flick from the start. “It completely changed the audience’s enjoyment of the movie,” says Hamada. Happy for them, but I’m no fan of test audiences or in medias res openings that we immediately jump backwards from – just start your damn movie and trust the audience to keep up and stay interested!
3. The opening face rip was the toughest thing to film, and they had to do it numerous times. Ten people operated the whole thing, and early attempts saw either too little or too much skin tear off from the face. “Technically, it was just a fucking nightmare.” They eventually got the percentage of carnage just right.
4. Roberts is a huge fan of David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone, and he thinks the title credits here bear a resemblance which makes him very happy.
5. Ben the chimp is played by Miguel Torres Umba, and he has a cameo out of the suit at 4:58 as the man seated across the aisle on the airplane. “He was really annoyed that I didn’t use him eating a banana.”
6. Interestingly (to no one but me), they shot the airplane scene a couple times because early takes felt too “dour.” They wanted to lighten the mood, but that only seems necessary because audiences just saw a guy’s face get ripped off, no? Filmmakers control the film’s tone!
7. The film is set in Hawaii, but most of the filming was done just outside London with some second-unit work done in coastal Portugal. The airport scene was filmed in a British high school, and “if you look carefully you can see a basketball hoop.” The house exterior is an actual home just outside London.
8. Roberts asks Hamada why he chose Primate as the first film from his new production company, 18Hz Productions, and he says both the premise (“Cujo with a chimp”) and the chance to work with the director of 47 Meters Down made it a no-brainer.
9. The film was originally being set up with Netflix – it was about two rabid dogs, and it was called The Pool – but the streamer told them audiences don’t want to see dogs in jeopardy. They changed it to a chimp and called it Chimpanzee, and Netflix immediately lost their phone number. Roberts credits the break in communication to the tepid audience response to his film, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City.
10. Hamada asked Roberts how he wanted to create the chimp, and the director mentioned that he had just seen some behind-the-scenes footage from 2023’s He Went That Way featuring Jacob Elordi and a practical chimpanzee costume. (Not Jacob Elordi *in* a practical chimpanzee costume, sadly.)
11. The father character wasn’t written as a deaf man, but Hamada likes to peruse lists of Academy Award nominees/winners when casting his films. They came across Troy Kotsur’s name, sent him the script, and were thrilled that he accepted.
12. Roberts fought to get Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night” to play over the pool montage, but he lost that fight and had to settle for a Charlie XCX track instead.
13. By contrast, he also fought to get the wide pull-back shot of the house on the cliff at 20:43, and he won. It was still a compromise, though, as they wanted it done via a scale model miniature, but the money folks ran the numbers and said it had to be visual effects instead.
14. Umba is five feet tall, so filming him as the chimp required some creative thought when it came to angles and scale. There were different prosthetic heads used for different angles and shots – ones with more motors inside were best filmed from head-on as they looked incredibly bulky from the side.
15. The pool was actually only five feet deep, so the actors had to pretend it was deeper by treading water in every shot where they’re not hanging onto the side. Dialogue was written and filmed to explain why the pool has no shallow end, but they ultimately decided that audiences neither needed it nor cared.
16. Nick (Benjamin Cheng) was originally meant to live to the end, but they realized that surely someone would try to push Ben off the edge of the pool and cliff – and Nick was nominated. They didn’t have the budget to film his actual impact and demise, but Roberts inserted storyboards during post-production with sound effects and screened it for test audiences. The reactions were positive every time, so the suits gave them the extra cash to shoot it right.
17. Adam (Kotsur) was written as someone who heads up construction projects, but they ran into issues when prepping to shoot a scene showing him on the job. The scale and necessary visuals showing a hotel under construction eluded them, so Roberts said, what if he’s just a writer? They made him the author of a successful series of mystery thrillers about a deaf detective, and Roberts adds that they would love to make one into a movie. “So Troy, if you’re listening, you can be the detective!”
18. The studio didn’t think the film could be done on a reasonable budget given the cost of a CG chimp, so Roberts and Hamada borrowed the chimp suit from He Went That Way, hired a young girl to wear it, and shot the closet sequence. They then showed it to the execs who were rightfully impressed and greenlit the film. The sequence wasn’t even part of the original script, but it played so well that they added it.
19. The studio was concerned that Ben, being a household pet, would be too empathetic and audiences would feel sad for him. Hamada recalled telling them, “We’re gonna make sure that you hate Ben, that he’s a complete asshole,” and they succeeded brilliantly as he’s a real prick.
20. All of the young actors, regardless of which character they were auditioning for, had to audition with Hannah’s (Jessica Alexander) 911 call scene. The filmmakers wanted to see who could convey fear while still maintaining a character, sharing information, etc. Hamada actually used the scene for auditions on a different film of his, too.
21. There were concerns that the two sisters, Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) and Erin (Gia Hunter), were escaping mostly unscathed while everybody else was being mauled to death, so they went back and found areas where reshoots could really mess them up without worrying about continuity issues. The beat where Erin’s pummeled and has her back clawed was a reshoot, and it works because her back is covered for the following scenes, which were all filmed before then.
22. Hamada says he tried to get Sequoyah to say “Welcome to whore mansion!” before she slams Ben with the shovel, but she didn’t quite buy that he was serious. Would have been a fun but silly callback!
23. The shot of Ben standing back up after they think they’ve killed him was filmed in reverse, “Carrie style.”
24. Some test audiences thought the shot of Ben’s blood spilling into the pool somehow meant the whole Hawaiian island’s water supply was going to get infected with rabies? I would make another jab at test audiences, but also, if I’m being honest, I would also watch the hell out of that movie.
Quotes Without Context
“I’ve been told I can’t sing, but I’m allowed to swear.”
“I wrote this fucking thing in Hawaii.”
“Simon Bowles, the production designer, did an absolutely incredible job, unlike some of the extras.”
“We live in an algorithm world.”
“After Resident Evil, I never thought I’d get a film again.”
“When he screams at them, and they look scared, they’re scared.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.
