Writer/Director Kiah Roache-Turner (Wyrmwood: Apocalypse) will unleash arachnophobia-inducing terror this week with Sting, featuring practical effects from 5-time Academy Award® Winner Weta Workshop, led by Creative Director Richard Taylor (Blade Runner 2049, King Kong, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy).

Well Go USA releases the giant spider horror movie in theaters on April 12, 2024.

In Sting, a mysterious object falls from the sky and smashes through the window of a rundown apartment building in New York City during a snowstorm. From it emerges a little spiderling, which is discovered by Charlotte (Alyla Browne), a rebellious 12-year-old girl obsessed with comic books. She opts to raise it as her new secret pet, dubbed Sting, but its insatiable appetite quickly spirals out of control.

Bloody Disgusting spoke with Kiah Roache-Turner about his arachnophobia-inducing creature feature, where he teased more about the film’s practical effects. In the process, the filmmaker revealed his profound, paralyzing aversion to the eight-legged creatures. Let’s just say that working on Sting did not alleviate Roache-Turner’s fears.

Roache-Turner said of Sting’s origins, “I’m rabidly arachnophobic. I don’t remember this, but my mother says that I was playing in a sandpit when I was about two and got bitten by a giant Australian spider, which I assume would’ve been a Huntsman because they get really big. They can get as big as dinner plates sometimes. So, that probably is the reason for me being just, like, yeah, when I see a spider, I go into a fight [mode]. I start tearing up. It’s quite terrible. I actually get that scared.”

He continues, “There’s something about the shape and the movement that actually freaks me out, so making this film was traumatic. I was hoping that if I just sat with spiders for two straight years, that I’d be cured. It’s like, nah, man, nothing has changed. All I’ve done is traumatize myself and, now hopefully, the world.“

Does being so “rabidly arachnophobic” make it easier to test whether a scary scene is working?

The filmmaker answers, “Maybe. But at the same time, with anything spider, I’m just terrified. So, if anything, I need to turn the volume up. Because if it’s just sitting there, I’m crying. It’s like, no, no, we need to make it move and eat people. So yeah, but it’s been fun to see all the arachnophobes all around the world freaking out. My favorite thing is to go through comments and just see people going, ‘I am not watching this. No way. Nope, nope, nope.’ And they’re not even watching it. They’re just seeing the trailer and going, ‘Okay, I can’t handle it.’ These are my people, and I love it.”

What makes Roache-Turner’s fear of arachnids even more fascinating is that he wanted his alien spider to look as natural as possible, save for a few key details.

“We just went with a redback because I think we’ve seen furry spiders,” he tells us. “We’ve done Shelob and Arachnophobia, the Amblin film that was a furry tarantula type thing. Even Vermines that came out from France, I think, are all Huntsman kind of furry things. One of my favorite horror films, probably in my top three, is Alien. The thing that scares me about Alien is that kind of reflective black skin. There’s nothing scarier than a hideous exoskeleton. That’s what I like about the spider, and I think the fur detracts from that. So, we went with a redback, which is an Australian spider. It’s not super big. They grow to, I don’t know, the size of a doorknob. I don’t know what the metric is for spider size.”

“But the thing I like about them is they look Alien-like, as in sort of Giger-ish because of the reflective thing,” Roache-Turner adds. “But they also have a really cool red racing stripe on the top, which is just great graphically. I had a chat with Richard Taylor of Weta; he’s one of my heroes. Even just working with him was like a mind-blow. We decided that the only change we would make is under the mandibles, under the fangs, we’d have almost like a dog’s mouth so that I could have that Alien shot where you do a close-up and you see the mandibles waving, and then you see the mouth open. You have to have that shot, and spiders don’t naturally have that, so we put that in. That’s the only change we made.”

Between a monstrous spider named after Bilbo Baggins’ Elvish dagger from The Hobbit, a lead heroine whose name nods to Charlotte’s Web and a creature design influenced by a horror classic, it’s safe to say that the influences are overt in Sting. 

“I like to wear my references on my sleeve, so I very much stole the spider ideas from Tolkien,” the filmmaker divulges. “I stole a huge amount from Stephen King’s It: spoiler alert, the clown is a giant alien spider. I loved the Muschietti films, but I was just like, ‘Where’s the spider?’ I was like, ‘Oh, well, if you are not going to do it, I’ll do it.’ So, I’ve got a giant black alien spider dragging people into air conditioning ducts, which is similar to a giant alien spider dragging people into the sewer, like what Stephen King set up.”

Despite working through an intense fear of spiders, there’s a sense of creature feature fun to Sting. That just speaks to Roache-Turner’s sensibilities as a horror filmmaker.

“It’s funny, with this one, I tried so hard to make a dark, scary, depressing, bleak, disturbing, horror film, and it still just kind of came out fun,” Roache-Turner muses. “I think it’s just my style.”

Sting releases in theaters this Friday, but you can also catch a sneak preview of the creature feature in partnership with Bloody Disgusting.