Johannes Roberts makes horror films, and the good ones are small. Put two women in a shark cage and he knows how to keep us there; hand him a town and a franchise and the fright drains away.
Fi1m perspective
Forty minutes into Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021), Johannes Roberts has made the film he set out to make. It is 1998, it is raining, and Raccoon City is a company town the Umbrella Corporation has finished with and is leaving to rot. The games this comes from were about being alone in a large dark building without enough ammunition, and the film remembers that for as long as it stays in one place. Then it divides its characters between a mansion and a police station, and every cut from one building to the other lets the air out of both.
That is the whole of Roberts in one film. He came up through self-funded micro-budget horror, starting with Sanitarium (2001), and his low-budget slasher F (2010) was the first to reach cinemas. The studio work followed: The Other Side of the Door (2016), 47 Meters Down (2017), The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018), a second shark film in 2019, the Resident Evil reboot and now the creature feature Primate (2025). He talks about John Carpenter and Stephen King as the people he is trying to live up to, and said of Raccoon City that what he wanted was a John Carpenter film that happened to be Resident Evil. It is an honest ambition, and he has not managed it yet.
What he can do is confinement. 47 Meters Down put two women in a shark cage at the bottom of the sea and stayed with them, and it worked because it never left. The sequel, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019), was received more coolly, and formula was the complaint.
What he cannot yet do is scale. Raccoon City has a dozen named characters, two buildings and a great deal of lore, and it keeps stopping to introduce someone. Dev Singh’s editing alternates rather than cross-cuts, so the tension in each building drains and has to be rebuilt from nothing. Mark Korven, who did such patient, scraping work on The Witch, is asked to bang on a door for an hour, and the computer-generated creatures move with a weightless, sped-up quality that no amount of shadow disguises. By the last half hour we were bored, then slightly cross about being bored, because the first forty minutes had shown us he knows exactly how this is done.
Roberts plainly loves horror, and loving it is not the same as making it frightening. Primate is, on paper, the kind of film he is good at: one creature, one confined story, nobody left to introduce. We would rather watch him in a cage than in a town, and the encouraging sign is that he seems to have gone back into one.
Biography
Johannes Christopher Edward Roberts (born 24 May 1976) is an English film director and writer. He began his career directing micro-budget horror films including Sanitarium (2001), Hellbreeder (2003), Darkhunters (2004) and Forest of the Damned (2005).
Roberts wrote and directed the slasher film F (2010). He later directed the television film Roadkill (2011) and the science-fiction horror Storage 24 (2012). His subsequent feature credits include The Other Side of the Door (2016), 47 Meters Down (2017), The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018), 47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019) and Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021), on which he also served as writer.
