Johannes Roberts has become one of my favorite up-and-coming filmmakers. After directing Storage 24, he’s gone on to helm The Other Side of the Door, 47 Meters Down, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, and The Strangers: Prey at Night, not to mention he’s currently developing the forthcoming Resident Evil reboot.
Before Roberts dove deep into 47 Meters Down, he had planned to get behind the camera for an infection-themed horror film that would have made your skin crawl.
Bloody Disgusting is excited to exclusively share a short teaser for The Plague that was filmed as a proof-of-concept for a feature film.
The Plague is quite simply about spiders that breed inside of human beings. The short is shockingly relevant, showing a man grotesquely invading a woman’s space on a public train. The woman, played by Natalie Cox, is scrolling through photos on her phone as the man makes note of a nasty looking spider nest in the background of one. She coughs furiously, with each surely to cause your heart to skip a beat. But that’s all just tension building for what comes next… Cox coughs up an enormous spider. The man quickly squashes it on the bottom of his shoe, only to see thousands of baby spiders come spilling out. As someone who is arachnophobic, I found this short teaser to be absolutely horrifying.
“I had just come back from India after shooting The Other Side of the Door and I had this idea about spiders that breed inside the human body,” Roberts tells Bloody Disgusting. “I pitched it to James Harris (producer) and we decided to shoot a proof-of-concept piece to raise money for a feature.”
“It was shot on two freezing cold days about five years ago,” he continues. “The underground stuff was shot at the transport museum in East London and the hospital sequence in a Quaker Church in Croydon. Polly Morgan shot it and Outpost did the VFX. In the end, we never made the movie as James and I went off to do 47 Meters Down instead. I just came across the teaser again and thought it was great fun in a horrible icky kind of way and also just seemed ridiculously current – so I thought your readers might get a kick out of watching it.”
“Maybe one day we’ll go back to it,” Roberts adds. “I think we are long overdue a great spider movie!”
No shelter in place will stop these spiders from crawling under your door and into your house…
