"I like to get things as horrible and tense as you can, and then burst the bubble with a laugh," says Sting director Kiah Roache-Turner. He might have made a movie about a giant flesh-eating spider, but he's not here to traumatize you. "That's just how I go about things. But then look at a film like Hereditary. Man, it's brutal, but it's so good. The Witch, by Robert Eggers; no laughs in that. It's just two very different ways of looking at it," he tells 12DOVE. "They say films have to be a bit of a reflection of you, and I just like to have a laugh. I hate when I'm sitting with an audience, and there are just long periods of silence. I'm like, 'You guys should be having fun. You paid your 20 bucks, you should get the whole lot: laughter, tears, screams.'"
The Australian writer-director put a lot more of himself into the upcoming genre flick than just his sense of humor, too. Starring The Blackening's Jermaine Fowler, Relic's Robyn Nevin, Wolf Creek 2's Ryan Corr, and Furiosa's Alyla Browne, Sting sees rebellious 12-year-old Charlotte (Browne) unknowingly bring a deadly, arachnid-resembling alien into her family's Brooklyn apartment – after it crash lands in her granny's dollhouse. Over the course of a few days, the comic book-obsessed youngster, who's having a hard time bonding with her illustrator stepfather Ethan (Corr), keeps her new pet plied with all the cockroaches she can find, which leads to its inexplicably fast growth. Before long, though, the entire block's residents find themselves fighting for their lives as the rapidly evolving beastie goes hunting for much bigger snacks.
Before the chaos kicks off – and it doesn't take long in this tight, 90-minute thrill fest – it was important for Roache-Turner to establish the characters; most notably its central blended family and Charlotte and Ethan's prickly relationship. The latter brings the former's stories, based on her fictional creation Fang Girl, to life, but the pair frequently clash when it comes to artistic vision. Charlotte sees 'The Professor', inspired by her distant dad, as somewhat of a hero of the tales but, due to a secret he and Charlotte's mum (Penelope Mitchell) are keeping from the pre-teen, Ethan is much less keen to paint him in a positive light. With that, it won't come as a shock to any seasoned horror fan that Sting is as much about familial bonding as it is evading the snarling gnashers of an eight-legged extraterrestrial.
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"You don't get a lot of stepparent/stepchild love in films like this, it's always just like, 'Oh, let's go with mother and daughter, father and daughter, father and son," says Roache-Turner. "It's so funny, the film has released in some countries now and there have been heaps of people coming up to me and going, 'Thank you, I have a stepdad or a stepmom, or I'm a stepparent,' and it's just struck me how rarely you see it reflected. I'm a stepparent and it's a big deal. My daughter came into my life when she was two, and man, we've gone on a real journey. She's now 17 years old, she's about to finish high school and I'm her dad, you know what I mean? All of it is in the film.
"We don't really argue that much, we've actually got a really good relationship. All the creative stuff came from my life; we both write and draw. She honestly helps me with my scripts sometimes. Like, I'll talk to her about a thing, and she'll be like, 'Oh, did you try this and this? And I'm like, how did you get this smart?!'" he chuckles. "All the yelling and crying and stuff, though, nah, that doesn't happen." What about running away from a humongous spider? "I have, actually, 'cause I live in Australia. We have spiders as big as a hand in this country, they're horrible. That's based on reality."
Go big (or go home)
When Charlotte first encounters the titular creature in Sting, it's the size of a regular spider, which initially meant that Roache-Turner's earliest script started… well, small. It was a bit of a slow burn, the filmmaker explains, as he recalls being asked to think up another, more exciting opening sequence after showing that first draft to the movie's distributors.
"They were like, 'Well, it doesn't really start with a bang, does it?'" he remembers. "They asked whether we could have the spider big in the beginning, and I'm like, 'You've missed the whole point of the whole film. It's supposed to start small and then get bigger and bigger and bigger. It's a big part of the narrative.' That's the way it had been designed.
"Fortunately, when I'm writing something, I'll go, 'What would be my short film proof of concept thing that I would put together to get financing for this?' All throughout my career I've done it," he notes. "So I kind of wrote that scene off the cuff as a concept thing, and then threw it in the top drawer and was like, 'Now, I'll just write the real film because we got funding, anyway.' It wasn't a problem. So the scene actually wasn't a part of the film at first. I just took it and inserted it as a flash forward."
The prologue sees Helga (Noni Hazelhurst), who later turns out to be another of Charlotte's grandmothers, hiring local exterminator Frank (Fowler) to investigate the strange noises in her walls. He pitches up, only to find Helga confused as to why he's there. Spotting green slime leaking from the air vents, Frank takes a closer look nonetheless, and comes face-to-face with Sting's skin-crawling final form before the movie cuts to four days earlier.
"The idea that even the audience would be like, 'Is she in on this or something? Has she got something in the ceiling that she's keeping as a pet, and she's feeding exterminators to it?' I kind of want to see that movie but then, of course, you discover that she's got Alzheimer's and it all starts to make more sense," Roache-Turner clarifies. "But yeah, it's a cool way to open a giant spider movie. I think. It's actually one of my favorite scenes."
While self-confessed arachnophobe Roache-Turner always knew his antagonist would be a giant spider, working out why the spider was giant was a little trickier. "You go, 'Alright, so we've got a laboratory mishap or some kind of ancient mythological thing that's unearthed? Chemical spill? You go through the stuff, and I'm like, 'What's the one with the least amount of exposition that I could get away with here?' he confesses candidly, before going on to say that Sting's… arrival on Earth was pinched from the first scene in John Carpenter's The Thing. "Exposition is the death of any storytelling. So if there's a fast way between A and B, it's usually the best way to tell the story, and I figured if I showed a meteor heading towards Earth, and a spider crawls out of the meteor? Done. I don't have to say anything."
Sting being an alien also allowed for a sense of creative freedom that wouldn't have been possible if the monster had just been a supersized insect. "I can do whatever I want," he says. "If I want the spider to have the mouth of a dog with teeth and goo dripping out of it? I could do that. If I want the spider to be a mimic and be able to mimic the sound of cats and dogs or babies crying? I can do that. Nobody's gonna question it. It's just total justification from that opening sequence."
Based on the Australian redback, it's no secret that Sting's design was in part influenced by one of the most iconic aliens in cinematic history: the Xenomorph. For Roache-Turner, he was getting a bit bored of all horror spiders being the furry kind – Huntsmans or tarantulas, mostly – and wanted to lean into something that looked more vicious. "I always thought the Xenomorph was spider-like even though when you see it, it's just a dude in a suit. The things coming off its back, like the tail and stuff, it always felt like spider legs to me, and due to the way Ridley Scott shot it, you could never really see the shape of it," says the filmmaker. "It felt like a cross between an intergalactic octopus, a Lovecraftian thing, or a spider. So to me, that black, reflective thing was always really interesting."
Roache-Turner collaborated with Wētā Workshop, the New Zealand-based company best known for its work on big-budget franchises like Lord of the Rings and Marvel, to create a real-life Sting. For him, it was imperative that the actors had something tangible to focus on on set but also, to counteract Hollywood's over-reliance on digital effects. "Remember I Am Legend? They just had digital vampires," he says. "And I'm like, 'Why do you need to do that when you can just put contact lenses and makeup on people, and they'd look fantastic? It's just not really scary.
"I got into this to point a camera at things. It's really awesome. And you get all these weird effects, you know, when the smoke hits the puppet, or its leg moves weirdly. When it interacts with a doorframe or when some water splashes off it – stuff you can't anticipate. That's all cool. It can be weird, though; sometimes it hits you when you're shooting at 2 o'clock in the morning, screaming at a fake spider with seven puppeteers underneath it, telling it to move correctly. But that's the fun of filmmaking."
Fang boy
Having made a name for himself helming action-horror Wyrmwood, which was described as "Mad Max meets Dawn of the Dead" when it came out in 2014, and its follow-up Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, Roache-Turner was keen to switch it up with his next big project – and what's more different to the Australian outback than a cramped New York City complex?
Although he loves road trip movies, the director says that he'd always wanted to make something more contained due to his aforementioned love of Alien, which, in his words, "is effectively just 'they're all trapped on a spaceship, and an alien is eating its way through the crew'". He explains: "I like the restriction of space, I like restrictions in general. Restriction in budget forces you to think creatively. Restrictions in space force you to think in interesting ways in terms of your action blocking. So I love the idea of having to, like, come up with cool things to do in an air conditioning duct. That's as restrictive as you get.
"There's a bit where Robyn's character is wandering around going, 'Here, kitty, kitty, kitty' and that's what [Brett] in Alien was doing when he gets killed so that's a different riff. I even think I had Ryan scream, 'Get away from her!' at one point," he laughs. "I'm disgustingly derivative when it comes to my filmmaking."
So if Sting is... Alien, in a sense, is Charlotte Ripley? A rather unsubtle nod involving a water pistol full of mothball juice towards the end of the movie suggests Roache-Turner thought so. For him, it was never an option to kill off the feisty protagonist either, bolstering her likeness to Sigourney Weaver's iconic final girl even more. Most other characters, he assures, are fair game, though. Especially the ones with four legs…
"I mean, God forbid, you can't kill a little girl and you can't kill a baby… They'd never let you make another film," cackles Roache-Turner. "I'm still getting guff from people going, 'How could you kill the cat?’ The cat was very happy. It was a very well-treated animal. Nobody gives two shits about the parrot, or the cockroaches but yeah, up in arms about the cat." Okay, maybe he’s here to traumatize you a little.
Sting releases in UK cinemas on May 31. For more on what else you should be watching at the cinema, be sure to check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.
