Christopher Smith, the director behind British-produced gems such as Triangle and Black Death, has lined up his next project. According to Variety, Smith will helm Spider Island, a horror comedy whose script was penned by a script by Christopher Jolley (The Price We Pay) and David Quantick (Veep). The film tells the story of a group of social media influencers who encounter deadly spiders at a luxury island resort. Let the arachnophobia commence.
Smith is excited about the project too, and he’s promising lots of laughs, thrills, and chills. “For a while now, I’ve been searching for the perfect project to create another horror that strikes a balance between laughs and screams, with the potential to truly stand out. The script for Spider Island checks all the boxes, and I can’t wait to bring the audience on that rollercoaster with me.”
Vertigo Films will produce the film, and Protagonist Pictures will deal with the worldwide rights. What’s more, Automatik VFX and Seb Baker, whose previous credits include Amazon Studio’s The Wheel of Time series, will handle the special effects.
This isn’t Smith’s first foray into the horror comedy realm, either. His 2007 feature Severance follows a team of white-collar employees who must contend with cannibalistic war criminals while on a retreat in Eastern Europe. Spider Island will undoubtedly be a different type of horror comedy, but the filmmaker has already shown that he can mine laughs and scares from stories with isolated settings.
Smith’s previous feature Consecration was released earlier this year. The Catholic-themed chiller tells the story of Grace (Jenna Malone), a woman who visits a convent on the Isle of Skye to investigate her brother’s suicide, only to realise things are not as they seem.