Why the evil-chimp slasher Primate got a radical last-minute rewrite

When Paramount Pictures’ animal-attack horror movie Primate debuted at Austin’s annual Fantastic Fest in September, the public release was still four months away. Attendees didn’t just get an early look at the gleefully gory, consciously campy horror movie about a family’s pet chimp Ben contracting rabies and going on a murder spree. They also got some startling stories about how it came together, including details about a major rewrite just ahead of shooting.

Director Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City) and stars Johnny Sequoyah (Dexter: New Blood) and Troy Kotsur (an Oscar-winner for CODA) explained the movie’s Stephen King influences, Roberts’ dedication to difficult practical gore effects, and why the movie’s ending had to radically change.

Yes, it’s Cujo with a chimp instead of a dog

Roberts is entirely open about the idea for Primate coming from Stephen King’s 1981 novel and 1983 movie adaptation Cujo, about a mother and child trying to survive when their rabid Saint Bernard attacks them. “I’m a massive, massive Stephen King fan, and a massive fan of Cujo,” Roberts said. He explained that watching his mother’s pet dog circling the family swimming pool inspired the movie, where Sequoyah’s character Lucy and her friends take refuge in a swimming pool, knowing Ben can’t swim, and that his hydrophobia will keep him away from the water.

“It just seemed like a really, really unpleasant idea,” Roberts said. “A dog, you kind of feel a sympathy with. But chimpanzees? I just think they’re scary. […] Dogs are one thing, but chimpanzees are little fucking shits.”

The chimp effects in the movie are mostly practical, Roberts said: Ben is played by an actor, Miguel Torres Umba, and the filmmaking team used prosthetics and puppetry to make him into a convincing, frightening animal.

“We did build all these animatronics, sculpts and stuff — there’s like a million different things we used there. If any of you have seen a behind-the-scenes of Cujo, seen all the different varieties of things that happened on that, [it’s] that kind of thing. I could go on for ages about how the different crazy things we bought, but for me, the big thing was, he had to have a personality. […] I wanted, in a sense, almost Freddy Krueger.”

The difference between drama and horror

Rick Kern/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures

Kotsur, a Deaf actor who spoke through a translator, talked about how he approached horror differently from his dramatic roles. “When you’re acting in a drama, you really have to prepare and have that feeling with what’s going on,” he said. “And with horror, it’s almost better when you don’t know what’s going on until you actually see it. […] You have to have an authentic reaction.”

With that in mind, he asked Roberts to conceal one grotesque prop from him. In the movie, Kotsur plays Lucy’s father, who is also Deaf. In one sequence, he enters a dangerous situation without realizing what’s going on, because he can’t hear Lucy screaming a warning. He doesn’t realize the danger until he finds one of Ben’s horrifically mutilated victims.

“Right before [shooting] that, I told everyone, ‘I don’t want to actually see [the corpse prop ahead of time],’” he said. “‘I’d prefer to be surprised. I want the camera to shoot my raw reaction.’ So when it was time to shoot, and they called ‘Action!’ they actually brought out this dead body. It really freaked me out. So what you see on screen was my actual first reaction.”

Asked about his favorite moment from the shoot, Kotsur said it actually came immediately afterward. “I had a lot of blood on me throughout this production,” he said. “And I was sitting down in a restaurant after production. A waiter screamed at me, and said, ‘What’s wrong? You’ve got blood all over your hands!’ I thought I had already washed all of the fake blood off, and of course I was fine, but there was blood on my hands throughout that entire shoot. So that was my favorite part, was seeing that waiter’s reaction.”

Scrapping the script

Photo: Rick Kern/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures

Early in Primate, audiences will have a familiar horror-movie feeling that they know which characters are being marked for death, and which ones are likely to survive. And they would have been right, according to the original script — but Roberts says he and producers Walter Hamada and John Hodges wound up rewriting everything at the last minute.

“I started this 15 years ago. The script was done, and we are there, [in the] studio and everything, maybe literally a week before filming,” Roberts said. “And suddenly […] it’s like, This fucker shouldn’t live.”

The decision, Roberts suggests, was based on the idea that the character in question tries something risky to fight back against Ben, and the audience needed to know why that wasn’t going to be possible, why the surviving characters didn’t have an easy way out. “So a week before filming, we just rewrote the entire script and killed [that character]. I love it.”

A different character death in the movie hit him harder, he said. “Even now, I watch it and I’m uncomfortable for all the wrong reasons. And that kind of thing is really great. [This particular death] is horrible — it felt horrible when we were doing it. It felt like doing a snuff movie.”

That said, Roberts underlined that he found the entire shooting process fun. “What I love about this movie is that the group of filmmakers that came together just wanted to make a movie that plays like this,” he said.

Primate is in theaters now.