--- name: "Johannes Roberts" canonical: "https://film.one/person/johannes-roberts" fi1m_id: "johannes-roberts" imdb_id: "nm1266897" tmdb_id: 100734 wikidata_id: "Q6216955" roles: ["Second unit director","Director"] born: "24 May 1976" reviewed_on_fi1m: 2 average_over: 1 updated: "2026-09-22T21:21:43.926779+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Johannes Roberts ## Identity Johannes Roberts - **Canonical:** https://film.one/person/johannes-roberts - **Type:** Person - **Fi1m ID:** johannes-roberts - **IMDb ID:** nm1266897 - **TMDB ID:** 100734 - **Wikidata ID:** Q6216955 - **Same entity:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Roberts, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6216955, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1266897/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/100734 Second unit director and director. Born 24 May 1976 in Cambridge, England, UK. ## Details - **Work:** Second unit director, Director - **Born:** 24 May 1976, Cambridge, England, UK - **Active:** 2021–present - **Also known as:** Johannes Christopher Edward Roberts - **Titles on Fi1m:** 2: 1 directing, 1 crew - **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Roberts, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6216955, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1266897/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/100734 ## Streaming the US now - **Disney+:** [*Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City*](https://film.one/film/resident-evil-welcome-to-raccoon-city.md) (47) For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country. ## Fi1m on Johannes Roberts > 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. 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. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com.* ## On Fi1m (2) ### Directed (1) - *Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City* (2021), Fi1m 47, Director, Writer — [page](https://film.one/film/resident-evil-welcome-to-raccoon-city.md) ### Crew (1) — the average rests on these - *The First Omen* (2024), Fi1m 72, Second Unit Director — [page](https://film.one/film/the-first-omen.md) ## Complete filmography (27) Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page. - *Primate* (2026), Director, Writer, Executive Producer - *Baby Blue* (2025), Executive Producer - *The First Omen* (2024), Second Unit Director — Fi1m 72, [page](https://film.one/film/the-first-omen.md) - *Play Dead* (2022), Producer - *V/H/S/99* (2022), Director, Screenplay - *Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City* (2021), Writer, Director — Fi1m 47, [page](https://film.one/film/resident-evil-welcome-to-raccoon-city.md) - *The Night House* (2021), Thanks - *The Plague* (2020), Director, Writer - *47 Meters Down: Uncaged* (2019), Executive Producer, Director, Screenplay - *The Strangers: Prey at Night* (2018), Director - *47 Meters Down* (2017), Director, Writer - *The Other Side of the Door* (2016), Director, Writer - *Turn Off Your Bloody Phone: An American Werewolf in London* (2012), as Man with Beer · Director, Writer - *Storage 24* (2012), Director, Screenplay - *Roadkill* (2011), Director - *F* (2010), Director, Writer - *When Evil Calls* (2006), Director, Writer, Story - *Forest of the Damned* (2005), Director, Screenplay - *Darkhunters* (2004), Director, Producer, Original Music Composer, Screenplay - *Hellbreeder* (2004), Director, Writer, Producer, Original Music Composer - *Sanitarium* (2001), as Doctor · Director, Writer, Original Music Composer, Sound Post Supervisor, Still Photographer, Sound Post Production Coordinator, Producer - *Border Patrol*, Director - *47 Meters Down: The Wreck*, Writer, Producer - *Flight*, Story, Director - *Hearts*, Director, Writer - *The Not Polly*, Director - *The Red Triangle*, Director, Writer --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/johannes-roberts