Colin Minihan’s killer bee movie has finished shooting, and it wrapped with a bigger cast than it started with. Deadline reported Thursday that Odeya Rush, Annarah Cymone and Neela Jolene have joined Stung, the survival thriller led by Justin Long and Iris Apatow.
Minihan wrote and directed. Teddy Parker, Kayln Harper, James Baccile, Tom DeNucci, Kea Ho and Rob Goon round out the cast. Andre Relis and Jib Polhemus produce, and VMI Worldwide is handling sales; the film went out to buyers at Cannes in May.
The setup is a sleepover. Four teenage girls are spending the night at a luxury home in Orange County when a swarm of Africanized honey bees gets inside, and the house stops being a house. Long plays Derek, the neighbor who cannot reach them.
“Stung taps into a very primal fear,” Minihan said in a statement when the project was announced. “You’re trapped, isolated, and under attack from something unstoppable. But beneath the horror, it’s also a story about friendship, trust, and survival.”
The Names That Just Landed
Odeya Rush is the addition genre readers will recognize fastest. She played Hannah in Sony’s Goosebumps in 2015, opposite Jack Black, which makes Stung a return to a register she has been away from for a while. Cymone and Jolene are the other two announced additions, and no roles have been specified for any of the three.
Bug Horror Has Worn This Title Before
Worth flagging for anyone who goes looking for this one later: there is already a Stung. Benni Diez’s version premiered at Tribeca in 2015 and concerned giant mutant wasps dismantling a garden party. Two years ago Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting put a giant alien spider in a decaying New York apartment building. Insect horror has been working a very small shelf of titles, and Minihan’s is the entry that stays closest to something a person could plausibly meet outdoors.
Minihan Keeps Locking the Door
Minihan’s filmography is a series of rooms nobody gets to leave. He co-directed Grave Encounters in 2011 with Stuart Ortiz, working as the Vicious Brothers, and set it loose in an abandoned psychiatric hospital. It Stains the Sands Red reduced the zombie movie to one woman and one pursuer in open desert. What Keeps You Alive put two people in a cabin and let the marriage handle the violence. A sealed house full of bees is the same instinct with different teeth.
Long Keeps Taking These Calls
This is Long’s second Minihan picture in two years. They made Coyotes together with Kate Bosworth, about a family pinned down by a pack of coyotes during a Hollywood Hills wildfire. Long arrived at that collaboration with one of the more durable horror résumés of his generation: Jeepers Creepers in 2001, then Drag Me to Hell, Tusk, House of Darkness and Barbarian — whose director, Zach Cregger, has Resident Evil in theaters next week.
What is not known: Stung has no distributor, no release date and no footage out. VMI is selling it, which usually means a buyer gets announced before anything else does.
