Keeping a chimpanzee as a family pet doesn’t sound like the best idea, but such is the premise of director Johannes Roberts’ latest horror film, Primate.
The filmmaker, best known for directing horror features such as 47 Meters Down and Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, has returned with a creature feature centered around the Pinborough family and their pet chimpanzee, Ben (played by movement specialist Miguel Torres Umba). When Lucy Pinborough (Johnny Sequoyah) returns home after her freshman year in college, she is looking forward to a carefree holiday with friends Hannah (Jessica Alexander), Kate (Victoria Wyant), and Nick (Benjamin Cheng), as well as her sister Erin (Gia Hunter). With her father, Adam (Academy Award winner Troy Kotsur), called away on business, Lucy and company are looking forward to decompressing by the pool at the family home, a luxury hideaway tucked into a secluded cliffside. But their tropical vacation soon turns into a terrifying, primal tale of horror and survival.
Roberts calls the movie his love letter to the first horror film he ever saw: Cujo. “For me, it opened up a whole new kind of horror based in real situations, not vampires and monsters,” Roberts explains. “I instinctively understood the way that the director Lewis Teague and the cinematographer Jan de Bont were manipulating the audience — I knew right then that I wanted to direct films like that.”
Stephen King’s classic story about a St. Bernard turned serial killer had Roberts wondering what might happen if a different kind of family pet developed a taste for murder. Chimpanzees, he learned, are intimidating animals. The charming, pink-faced infants that people fall in love with mature into 150-pound beasts that can revert to their primal instincts in seconds. “Chimpanzees can be evil, terrifying creatures in real life. They hunt other animals and even other chimps for food. They fly into rages,” he says. “The more research I did, the darker the picture became.”
With their brains and brawn, Roberts knew a chimp would be the perfect device for his next film. “I love the horror genre, both as a director and a movie fan,” he says. “As an audience member, I love being scared in a safe environment. As a filmmaker, it allows me to play in a fantasy world that is a lot of fun, where the director’s job is manipulating the audience. The goal is to get them to jump and scream all together. It’s a very communal, theatrical experience.”
Roberts and his fellow filmmakers doubled down on the immediacy of the story with a crucial decision early in pre-production. Whenever possible, they used practical, in-camera effects created on set, rather than relying on high-tech visual effects in post-production. They went as far as to have top effects house Millennium FX develop a custom-designed “monkey suit” for actor and movement specialist Miguel Torres Umba to wear as Ben in a stunning live-action performance. “We chose practical effects because it is such a visceral movie,” Roberts says. “Primate is a proper old-school horror movie. After all the movies I’ve made, I have never felt so scared in my gut. Put simply, it is terrifying. It has playful moments but it’s a white-knuckle ride from beginning to end. This kind of mayhem done in camera heightens the tension. You feel the shock of it all. It’s wall-to-wall horror.”
On his pick to play the lead character of Lucy, Roberts says, “Lucy’s basically run away from the situation and left her family behind, especially Erin. She feels like she has a lot to face up to at home. I originally saw the character as something of a nerd. Then Johnny Sequoyah came in with such an interesting read. She brought nuance to the part that no one else did. Johnny has a presence that takes this movie to the next level. She threw herself into all the stunts and the action, while giving a truly heartfelt performance.”
Roberts also has a lot of praise for Troy Kotsur, who plays Lucy’s dad, Adam. Kotsur became the first deaf male performer to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in the Best Picture winner, CODA, in 2022. “The part was not originally written for a deaf actor. But I am a big fan of Troy’s, so we decided to approach him. He has to be the nicest human being on earth. His energy is amazing. I learned a lot from him about what it’s like to be deaf, mundane things that are slightly different, which helped make this more authentic.”
Primate opens in Philippine cinemas on January 21.
