Writer/Director Kiah Roache-Turner (Wyrmwood: Apocalypse) lets a monstrous spider loose this week with Sting, featuring practical effects from 5-time Academy Award® Winner Wētā 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.

The spider at the center of this horror movie may come from outer space, but it closely resembles an Australian redback spider. Bloody Disgusting spoke with Richard Taylor about the film’s practical effects and eerie spider puppet. Richard Taylor walked us through the daunting task of creating a giant spider puppet on a smaller production.

“This is an immensely challenging project, and obviously, most directors would naturally pursue a CG solution, which is ultimately complicated in its own right due to the challenges of doing something digitally,” Taylor tells us. “But the actual ability to then map it into the world and make it move in a plausible way is a relatively simple byproduct of the technology. Doing it as a puppet, which has to do a large number of performance actions and achieve all of the movements of a spider, and be able to do that in a confined space, sets up a huge number of challenges, of course. Then, building something in a short period of time, trying to get the chitinous quality and reflective nature of the shell.”

Taylor continues, “Where once we might have done sculptures and molds and casts and made it out of fiberglass, et cetera, today we were able to entirely 3D print it. The 3D printing material, the actual nylon, had the beautiful quality of the surface that Kiah wanted, which made it that much easier. But of course, you’ve got eight legs, all of them internally articulated, the articulation of the face, the pedipalps, the reflectivity of the eyes, the pumping of venom, the dripping of the teeth, the moving of the abdomen against the head. Then, of course, trying to combine all of that with three to four puppeteers that are all interacting simultaneously in very tight spaces. So yeah, it’s a delightfully challenging job. We loved making it, and we loved interacting with Kiah, and anyone who wants to do a physical monster movie is a friend to us. So it was a very exciting job and something we were very pleased to be working on.”

Choosing a redback as the model for Sting comes with unique challenges, thanks to the arachnid’s smooth exoskeleton and ultra-thin legs. Taylor breaks down how they approached the creature’s anatomy and design.

“Kiah, being an arachnophobe, knew exactly the type of spider he wanted. Originally, it was just going to be an exact replica of a redback, and we could follow the anatomical accuracy of that, and that’s indeed what Sting is, other than its face, which ultimately we resolved through Kiah’s wonderful drawings,” Taylor explains. “The great thing about Kiah is that he has the ability to communicate through sketch art very accurately what he wants, so the face evolved. But other than the face, he stayed true to his first words on the first day that we met him because he knew exactly the type of spider that scared the bejeebus out of him, so that was really good.”

He continues, “But that spider has very, very slim limbs, as you note, and the required articulation and each joint becomes a very complex thing. Building something that is of that delicacy to last a single shot is one thing. Building something that will last the six to eight weeks of a shoot, where it is day-to-day going through a very dramatically different set of performance requirements, some jumping, some landing, some being thrown across the room, some looking like it’s delicately bringing its legs through the inside of an air vent, etcetera. The puppeteers are operating the most delicate of rods. We sent our head engineer, Joel [Ahie-Drought], who did a lot of the walking rigs for this puppet, to look after the puppet.

“There were three primary puppeteers. They had to learn to work in complete synchronization so that it feels like the legs are being driven by the mind of the spider, not by three external puppeteers. I’m looking forward to seeing that outcome very much. But you’re right, the operation of legs, because they’ve got so many joints as well, running all the way back to the body. It’s so very tricky but good fun. This is what gets us up in the morning, and it was just so delightful to be set on this challenge and get to make this. We have a replica of Sting proudly mounted on our animatronics wall because the animatronics team was really the brains behind the inside of the creature.“

Creating a practical effects-driven creature is one thing, but having a filmmaker who knows how to film it is an entirely different story. To that end, Richard Taylor has nothing but effusive praise for Kiah Roache-Turner.

“Kiah obviously has an extraordinary career ahead of him, having done a small number of movies by the time we met him,” Taylor raves. “But his confidence and sophistication of communication around the language of film, and specifically around the language of film effects, was really delightful to us. He was able to have great specificity around what he wanted. It wasn’t ever wishy-washy. He didn’t flip and flop around a subject he knew. He came to us with a firm understanding of the type of creature he wanted, but then how he wanted it to work and how he wanted it to achieve certain shots for him. So much of it was about the way it would be lit and the way it would have the right chitinous, reflective, slightly hairy, malicious quality that he finds to be scary in a spider.

“We’ve done other spider projects in the past where the director has a different relationship with a different type of arachnid, but Kiah, obviously, growing up in Australia, had a very specific type of arachnid that evokes the highest level of fear in him, and that’s what he wanted to try and find in this. A lot of our R&D and our development and our sharing, we’d get on a video conference with him very frequently. In the very early days of the project, I just had to act it out with my hand, and I would try and perform the face for him and act out the pedipalps and how the jaw might move, the size of it, and how it might leap, and so on.”

See Wētā Workshop’s work in action in Sting, now playing in theaters.