There are countless new horror movies you could watch this October as you prepare for Halloween, but only one of them had an “ant handler” on set.
That movie is Don’t Move, a new Netflix original about a woman, Iris (Kelsey Asbille), who tries to flee from her would-be murderer after being injected with a nasty dose of paralyzing serum. Early in the film, while her paralysis is still settling in, Iris attempts to hide within the roots of a massive tree, only for a colony of nearby ants to race up her arm, onto her face, and into her — well, you get the idea.
The ants you see onscreen are a mix of actual insects and CGI (don’t worry, the one that goes up her nose isn’t real), which required the involvement of an “ant handler” to make sure both humans and bugs stayed safe throughout production.
“No ants were harmed during the making of Don't Move,” producer Zainab Azizi tells Inverse.
From directors Brian Netto and Adam Schindler (with an assist from producer Sam Raimi), Don’t Move is a thrilling game of cat and mouse with a twist: the mouse loses control of its body and somehow has to outwit an increasingly unhinged cat. The cat in this case is Richard (Finn Wittrock), who finds Iris alone in the woods and seizes on the opportunity.
The idea for Don’t Move came from Netto, who says he was inspired by his own experience with sleep paralysis (“not fun”) and decided to see if he could turn it into a movie.
“For a long time, it was just the idea of paralysis,” Netto tells Inverse. “When we married it with the journey of the character, it just took off.”
“It's a page-turner,” adds Azizi. “It's the perfect Friday night date night film.”
Don’t Move is a tight 92-minute movie that plays out in real-time, which means we get to watch as Iris becomes more and more paralyzed before eventually regaining control of her body. The camera never leaves Iris or her perspective, but at the same time, we never quite get inside her head, which makes each increasingly desperate move she makes all the more jarring. (At one point, shortly after the ants, Iris throws herself into a rushing river to escape Richard.)
“We wanted the middle of the film, the midpoint, to be the paralysis,” Netto says, “and then we wanted her body to slowly wake up.”
When Don’t Move does reach that midpoint and Iris is so drugged up she can’t even lift a finger, the movie does something clever: it introduces a third character in the form of an elderly groundskeeper who finds her body and tries to protect her. In the great horror tradition of kindly strangers who try to get in a murderer’s way, you can probably guess how this encounter ends, but because of the added context of Iris’ paralysis, it takes on an extra layer of meaning.
“It's such a personal story that we also didn't want to leave her in the middle when she's completely paralyzed,” Schindler says. “So we created a kind of an avatar for her, so to speak, to give over some of the movement to another character.”
Netto adds that these scenes took some inspiration from an unexpected modern classic: Inglourious Basterds. “The opening with Christoph Waltz's character and the farmer; you have these two people whose conversation will decide the fate of someone else in that room.”
Don’t Move is being released under the banner of Raimi Productions, and Sam Raimi’s fingerprints are all over it. From the movie’s bright colors and kinetic camera movement to the way it relishes in gore and bloodshed, you can see the influence of Raimi classics like Evil Dead and Drag Me to Hell in nearly every scene.
While Azizi was the one who picked up Don’t Move off a pile of scripts, Raimi was closely involved every step of the way after that.
“We read through the script with them line by line,” Netto says.
When it was time to shoot the movie, Raimi even traveled with them to the set in Bulgaria and oversaw the process, which included hiking a mountain to get one important shot.
But from the entire experience, one moment, in particular, stands out. Schindler recalls the night before filming began:
“We had dinner in a small town in Bulgaria, and he was telling us how nervous he was about shooting the movie. We're like, ‘You're nervous? You've been doing this for decades. What are you talking about?’ It just shows how much of a fan of this film he is. He was excited for all of us. He was excited for himself. He was excited for the actors. He was excited for this whole process. He just wants to make movies.”
Adds Netto: “He wanted this movie to succeed.”
