Horror needs fewer Final Girls, and more Final Couples

At the 2025 Fantastic Fest film festival, director Johannes Roberts followed Primate’s world premiere by telling the audience he originally had a radically different plan for the movie: In the screenplay he’d been working on for 15 years, Lucy and Nick survived and got together. But “maybe literally a week before filming,” he rewrote the script to kill Nick off early, to make it clearer why the rest of the characters couldn’t just climb to safety as well. “It’s like, ‘This fucker shouldn’t live! And you need to know the edge of the [cliff] is dangerous! So a week before filming, we just rewrote the entire script and killed him.”