Horror gets a new creature this month. Benni Diez’s “Stung,” now available on VOD, is a new take on an old concept: nature’s most terrifying creatures grow to thousands of times their own size.

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This time, picnic pests with stingers are the altered beasts, and a catering company led by an exasperated waiter (Clifton Collins Jr.) must defend himself and guests from the venomous flying gargantuans.

Director Benni Diez talked with iHorror about the movie, his inspiration and what audiences can expect.

Lance Henriksen feels the sting.

The inspiration for “Stung” was actually based on true events, somewhat. Screenwriter Adam Aresty was employed at a catering company, where he experienced a nasty swarm of bees.

The elitist clients were so annoying that Aresty began to fantasize about the insects becoming large enough to attack them on a human-sized scale. The writer’s love for monster movies inspired him to sit down and bring the fantasy to life on paper.

After reading the screenplay, Diez loved the idea and decided to bring the concept to film.

Kitchen Nightmares

Diez wants people to watch the film and be amazed at what they are witnessing. The director says that James Cameron was a big influence and he wanted to bring that suspense to “Stung,”

“I watched Aliens and the Terminator movies at a very young age, too young probably, and my brain almost couldn’t handle what I was seeing there. I guess that’s one thing that drives me, trying to induce that feeling in an audience, to make them think ‘holy shit, I can’t believe what I’m seeing right now’ – hopefully in a good way of course,” he said.

Unlike the paltry budgeted laughable creature features so often played on genre networks such as SyFy, Diez says he knows that human-sized wasps are a gamble to viewers sensibilities. But he thinks that his cast was key in making “Stung” more than a 90-minute parody,

“There’s a balance you need to keep,” he said. “If you play it too straight, the characters will seem ridiculous, if you poke too much fun at it, their emotional believability suffers. I owe it to our great actors that I think we found a way to be funny in the face of insanity that lets you root for them even more.”

On the business end of a stinger

One of those actors, Lance Henriksen (Terminator, Aliens) kept the atmosphere on the set comical. Diez recalls a time when the actor made the whole crew laugh,

“We had such a blast on set all the time. But one of the most hilarious moments was when Lance Henriksen, while we all had lunch break, winked at Ulrik, our stunt trainer, who was still wearing a woman’s dress from a panic scene we had been shooting, and slipped him a napkin with his phone number on it.”

Although the concept of “Stung,” giant wasps invading a wealthy catering event, would appear to contain less-than-extravagant special effects and shoddy patchwork rendering, Diez decided to use a majority of real-time creatures created by some of the best in the business.

“The practical creature effects were done by Design Of Illusion, a Berlin based company run by Martin Schäper. They had over a dozen artists work day and night for so many months to accomplish the many puppets, animatronics and gore effects. All the full CG creatures and the countless other digital effects were created by an in-house team of artists lead by my longtime collaborators Peter Hacker and Sebastian Nozon. I’ve lost count of how many times those guys saved our asses in what became almost a year of intense post production. The third and equally important effects category is our sound design. Tilman Hahn, our lead sound designer, spent months recording and editing an insane variety of real life sounds to give the wasps character and make them as menacing as they are.”

Keep your eye on them

As for gore, Diez says there is plenty of it. Every ounce of budget that could be used for make-up and creature effects was poured into filming. The director has a love for fans and he wasn’t going to disappoint them with “Stung.” In fact, he was going to sit there and watch it with them over and over again:

“I think many genre fans will be delighted with some of the disgusting ideas we came up with,” he said. “Many filmmakers tend to leave the theater at screenings of their own films because they’ve just seen them a million times, but I still enjoy sitting through, just because it’s such a blast to hear the audience squirm and giggle at the screen. That’s what we should make movies for, after all.”

Diez is hard at work finding his place in the realm of motion pictures. He seems to be getting his hands dirty in all departments, including continuing “Stung” as a possible franchise:

“I am developing a few genre projects with our producer Ben Munz, hoping that one of them might turn into a movie in the near future,” he said. “Other than that I still do occasional visual effects work, and I’m flexing my writing muscles as much as I can. And of course there have been talks about potential Stung sequels, but that depends on how this one is received. Times are definitely not boring right now!”

Within the bold realm of Mother Nature there are plenty of opportunities to explore her monsters. “Stung” captures one these creatures and gives them human-sized thoraxes equipped with needle precise stingers.

What separates this movie from the others within the same concept, is a director’s ambition to not only get it right with the genre audience, but have the stingers firmly planted in cheek while doing so.

“Stung” is now available on VOD. Check you streaming device for details.