Interviews
‘Sting’ Writer/Director Kiah Roache-Turner is Severely Arachnophobic… So He Made a Spider Horror Movie
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.
Nothing is the same when two crewmates return to shore in Rose of Nevada, the latest by Enys Men filmmaker Mark Jenkin.
Time and reality blur for stars George Mackay (Wolf, 1917) and Callum Turner (Green Room, “Neuromancer”) in the hallucinatory time travel mystery releasing in New York and Los Angeles theaters on June 19, 2026.
But this isn’t your standard time travel movie.
Rose of Nevada bends time and genre in its exploration of Cornish identity and community, upending the lives of Nick (MacKay) and Liam (Turner). There’s a listless, dreamy quality to the time travel, and for inspired reason: Jenkin approaches it like a haunting.
While time travel was on his mind early in the writing process, Jenkin’s partner and collaborator asked a question that unlocked Rose of Nevada and inspired the filmmaker.
Jenkin explains, “I remember saying to Mary [Woodvine], my partner, who’s in the film, I said to her, ‘God, it really seems like I’ve fallen into this thing of either making films about ghosts or films about time travel,’ and then she said to me, ‘Yeah, but aren’t all ghost stories just time travel films, and aren’t all time travel films just ghost stories?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, great. So I’m not making two types of films. I’m actually always making one type of film.’ But that was ultimately liberating because I thought there’s a nice gap or a crossover in the perception of genres, there’s a lot of room to play and to be free within that.”
“Once I’d abandoned the idea that I was going to master quantum physics in any academic sense,” the filmmaker continues, “It was incredibly freeing because I thought, ‘Well, I can just set my own rules here,’ and it really doesn’t matter what the rules are as long as you stick to them. You can’t bend them for the sake of the plot or for the sake of a character arc or something. You have to establish those rules upfront and stick to them, which made me really think I’ve got to limit the time travel element. This film can’t be about time travel.“
Bearing the brunt of the time travel disruption is Mackay’s Nick, a man struggling to support his family before the ill-fated voyage upends his entire world. It’s the type of role that was an easy yes for the actor, simply because of the filmmaker behind it.
“I saw Bait at the cinema when it was first out a few years ago and was so struck by it,” Mackay tells BD. “I just hadn’t seen a film like it. I want to work with the best directors. I want to work with the best directors and people who have a singular vision. As an actor, the process of work is almost my biggest draw, as well as what a story’s saying, but I think you learn by doing, and if I can do my bit in as many different ways as possible. The physicality and the discipline of Mark’s filmmaking, how that is so entwined in the DNA of the film, and therefore in the way that I work within it, that was the biggest draw. I’m just a fan of Mark’s. I was just very pleased to be involved.”
That reflects in Rose of Nevada‘s unique casting; Mackay initially was eyed for Liam.
“When I first got the call to meet Mark at the audition stage,” Mackay said, “We didn’t wind up reading scenes, but they said, ‘There’s a project. There are two roles in it that you could be right for, and Mark is leaning towards you for Liam.’ So, I had a look at Liam, Callum’s role, and had my interpretation of the script ready to talk about it and what I thought that character was, who he was, and how I’m thinking about how I might inhabit that or what I saw in him. And when we met, we didn’t talk about the film at all. We spoke about everything else. But following that meeting, I got the message, said, ‘Mark would like you to be part of the film, but he thinks you’re definitely more of a Nick,’ which I think I just may be a complete sheep because I went, ‘Of course I’m Nick.’
Mackay continued, “But it’s funny, I do have in my own life, I just started a family, and so much of my last few years of being has been trying to figure that balance and what that means and how you navigate that. So with family being at its core and all the kind of conundrums that come with staying level with that, that rang true. So I felt like I understood objectively, I have my interpretations of what both men mean to each other and within the story, but then once I was playing Nick, I just became about a very present focus on who he was and what his situation was. What I liked about him is that he’s a very straightforward bloke. In the best possible way, he’s quite a simple man. It’s just he’s in an extraordinary situation.”
Jenkin wrote Rose of Nevada during the pandemic lockdown that had forced a halt in production on Enys Men. He’d return to rewrite once Enys Men had been completed, creating overlap between films. “They are even more in conversation than you’d think because the first draft of Rose of Nevada was before I’d made Enys Men, and then everything I learned through the making of Enys Men, I fed into Rose of Nevada. But also the reaction to Enys Men, all the critics and writers and audience members who are telling me what Enys Men was about. I’m always the last to realize what I’ve done, I think like most filmmakers. You don’t really know what you’ve made a film about until the audience tells you. I was able to feed that into Rose of Nevada and also scale it up a little bit. So, yeah, in some ways it predates Enys Men, and in some ways it follows on from it,” he said.
Jenkin’s latest caps what’s unofficially been dubbed his Cornish trilogy, a moniker that initially surprised the filmmaker, but he’s come to embrace it. A recent revisit of Bait made it even clearer. “I can now understand why people are linking the three films together. I’d forgotten how linked they are, which is amazing, really, considering the first draft of Bait was written in 1999. So, most of my adult life has been one way or another making this trilogy. I am quite looking forward to starting the next chapter.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.