Netflix issue warning to subscribers to not watch new movie
On October 31st, Netflix added a horror movie to its service that came with a warning for viewers with one of the world’s most common phobias.
Sting, a low-budget fright flick originally released in April, 2024, hit the service on Halloween. Directed by Kiah Roache-Turner and starring teen actress Alyla Browne – who played the young version of Imperator Furiosa in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – the film follows a girl named Charlotte who secretly raises a small spider as a pet in her apartment building. Naturally, because the spider hatched from a strange glowing object that fell from the sky, it soon grows very, very big indeed and begins terrorising her family and neighbours.
The streaming giant, therefore, warned fans that those with arachnophobia might want to approach the film with caution. In fact, the film’s tagline also functioned as a warning: “Your biggest fear just got bigger.”
Sting is an Australian production funded by Screen Australia and Screen NSW but distributed by Well Go USA Entertainment in America and StudioCanal in Europe. Its cast is almost entirely Australian, aside from American comedian Jermaine Fowler (Coming 2 America, Ricky Stanicky), who plays eccentric exterminator Frank.
Viewers who don’t fear creepy crawlies sang the film’s praises on social media, with one fan posting, “Sting has all the slickness of a Hollywood Blumhouse production but with a bit more depth to its characters and more thought given to its scares.”
However, a more squeamish fan wrote, “As it’s Halloween, I watched Sting on Netflix. Don’t watch if you really hate spiders, especially ones that arrive from space!”
‘Sting’ was born from personal experience
In April, director Roache-Turner – a self-confessed arachnophobe – told MovieWeb that part of Sting’s inspiration came from a horrifying personal experience.
He revealed, “I don’t remember because I think I was two, but apparently, I was sitting in the sandpit, and I got bitten by a giant Australian spider, and if you know anything about Australian spiders, they get really big. As an arachnophobic, I couldn’t think of anything scarier than a panther-sized spider that’s going to drag you into air conditioning ducts and slowly devour you in a basement. And so, yeah, I wrote a film about it.”
Fascinatingly, Roache-Turner thought that working on the film would help lessen his fear of spiders through exposure. Ultimately, though, being on set with a giant animatronic spider made by the geniuses at Wētā Workshop actually had the opposite effect.
He admitted, “It was really hard. I was hoping it would be curative, but it actually kind of made it worse. All the research I did just made me more scared of spiders, and I still hate them. It hasn’t helped. And walking on set…it bothered me.”