The Origins Of Aranea
I recently added Aranea to the script archive, but I wanted to provide a brief addendum regarding the central theme of the project and how it came to be.
The initial impulse was to engage directly with comedy-horror. It is a highly entertaining genre that, at its best, possesses a tradition of social commentary. Much like An American Werewolf in London utilised a creature feature to dissect isolation and the stiff-upper-lip response to tragedy, Aranea uses its monster to expose the absurdity of British upper-middle-class repression.
To ground the narrative, I leaned sincerely into my own conceptualisation of the British countryside, populating the manor with characters drawn in large part from memory. And in a crucial addition to this, I anchored the story in the perspective of an autistic child. As a neurodivergent person, injecting my own sensory and observational experiences into the protagonist provided the personal stakes necessary to elevate the script beyond a simple genre exercise.
The choice of a primeval spider as the overt monstrous force was, at its core, born of a personal fear. There is a visceral, crawling dread in the pervasive nature of an arachnid infecting a pristine, upmarket household. The creature acts as the physical manifestation of a deeper, underlying curse – the ‘sins of the fathers’ – that sets the tragedy in motion. However, the exact rules of this curse are kept intentionally ambiguous, allowing the audience space for their own interpretation.
Ultimately, Aranea represents a steep, if slightly crooked step towards my overarching aim as a screenwriter. That is, to strike a precise balance between open-ended arthouse observation of life and the robust craft of commercial genre cinema. The goal is always to keep an audience thought-provoked and guessing, whilst firmly adhering to the cinematic tropes – the suspense, the comedy, the sheer horror, and the adventure – that bring us into the dark in the first place.