Warning: Major spoilers for PrimateDirector Johannes Roberts didn’t pull any punches with his new natural horror film Primate, but the real reason the movie has a pretty great Rotten Tomatoes score for a January studio horror movie is the animal at the center of the story. The context for Paramount’s well-reviewed blood-soaked offering is simple enough: a family has an intelligent pet chimpanzee that goes on a killing spree after he is infected with rabies.
But unlike Roberts’ 2017 killer shark movie 47 Meters Down or even a classic like Cujo, there’s something deeply unsettling about an intelligent animal with human-like qualities going off the deep end as opposed to a simpler creature. Roberts clearly understands that, and his characterization of Ben in Primate is a huge part of what makes the movie so legitimately scary.
Ben The Chimpanzee Gets Smarter And Seemingly More Evil
Primate uses garden-variety rabies as the catalyst for the carnage, but given that it’s so rarely seen in great apes, Roberts had some leeway in how he was able to have it present in Ben. He certainly took some creative liberties, but that’s what made Ben such an intimidating killer animal.
Ben doesn’t just go wild like most rabid animals might—he gets more calculating, smarter, and more vengeful. At certain points, he even mocks his victims, at first laughing and then tormenting them with his speech tablet after throwing one off a cliff to their death. Chimpanzees have expressive faces to begin with, and Miguel Torres Umba, the actor inside the Ben bodysuit, does exceptional work in communicating genuine malice.
In multiple instances, Ben even toys with his victims. After killing one of the boys by ripping his lower jaw off (shown by Roberts in gruesome, bloody detail), Ben even plays with the broken-off jaw piece, pretending to use it as his own mouth and mocking him as he laughs. As opposed to an animal gone wild, Ben feels like a calculating creature with genuine slasher charisma in Primate.
Primate Works Because It Embraces B-Horror
While that Michael Myers-esque anthropomorphization makes Ben far more intimidating than the average ape, Roberts’ really sticks the landing by completely leaning into the B-movie concepts that audiences have come to expect. Horny young adults making dumb decisions meeting their end in increasingly grisly fashion at the hands of an ultra-intelligent killer ape can only really work one by embracing those tropes, and almost all of it works by the end of Primate.
Roberts even goes so far as to give Ben a “signature kill” as if he was a slasher. Jason Voorhees has his machete, Michael Myers has his big chef’s knife, and Ben pulls the jaws off people using his natural strength. After demonstrating it to great effect as mentioned above, he attempts to employ the same technique to kill the movie’s protagonist, Johnny Sequoyah’s Lucy. It helps Primate toe the line between silly and serious, and the end result is undoubtedly fun.
- Release Date
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January 9, 2026
- Runtime
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89 Minutes
- Director
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Johannes Roberts
- Writers
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Ernest Riera, Johannes Roberts
- Producers
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Walter Hamada, John Hodges, Bradley Pilz
