In An Exceptional Year For Horror, Let’s Not Forget The Simple, Violent Delights of Primate

It’s been a fantastic year for horror movies, and we’re still a long way off from October. Films like Obsession and Backrooms are dominating the box office, with horror seemingly being the only genre able to make a significant impact. But outside of these very Gen Z horror movies, tackling liminal spaces and modern love, there was another 2026 horror film I don’t want to see forgotten. A throwback creature-feature I had an absolute blast watching: Primate.

Primate works by embracing two universal truths: monkeys and rabies are terrifying. Combine the two and you have a perfect horror premise. Rabies is like a fictional disease from a horror movie anyway. One bite and fifteen minutes later you’re condemned to a frothy-mouthed, crazed death. It’s like zombies but actually real. I live in the middle of England but I’m still terrified of catching rabies. It’s a fear not tapped into enough in horror films.  

Maybe I saw Congo at too young an age. I found Simon Callow being raped by a gorilla in Ace Venture: When Nature Calls as disturbing as Jim Carey climbing out of a robot rhino’s backside was funny. But I have never understood the desire to treat monkeys (and I am going to use chimpanzee and monkey interchangeably here despite knowing they are different) as friendly pets. They aren’t cute little hairy people you can put in nappies. They are dangerous animals with sharp teeth, creepy laughs, and are freakishly strong. Just look up photos of chimps with alopecia to see their insane muscles. They can rip your face off and Primate understands this: someone gets their face ripped off in the opening scene.

The premise is simple: Cujo with a chimpanzee. The family pet chimp gets bitten by a rabid mongoose and turns on its owners, hunting down a girl and her friends as they party at her house like a monkey Michael Myers. It is as wonderfully simple as it gets: a slasher movie with a killer chimp. It’s well-executed, full of brutal kills, and a swift 83-minutes without credits. What more could you want? It’s an unpretentious throwback to a simpler time of horror and one of my favourites in a good while. A cross between Halloween and Karl Pilkington’s Monkey News, it’s a film of simple, violent delights.

Ben is presented as a classic horror villain, his mouth shot like a xenomorph’s, his chimp face like a killer’s mask, and his breath steaming up whatever he pushes it against, bringing to mind the raptors from Jurassic Park. But the film never loses sight that he is a chimpanzee. And the rabies doesn’t exactly turn him mad but malicious. He has fun with it, and the viewer does too. It’s a dark and brutal film but for a person who finds chimps genuinely unsettling it’s still a fun watch. I half expected Ben to start throwing shit at the girls and taunting them by wanking. He may be losing his mind but he’s having a blast while it happens.

Wisely the film has the chimp be a man in a suit and while it’s sometimes obvious and a little silly I much prefer that real, tactile approach to a CGI monkey. That wouldn’t be threatening at all. And overall the cast is strong. Troy Kotsur is a standout, gaining a lot of respect from me for following up an Oscar win with a silly horror film. His deaf character nonchalantly wandering around the house, eating pizza, while his daughter gets brutalised by a chimp a few feet away is a highlight.

Although the true stars of the movie might be the house and the soundtrack. Situated on a cliff edge in Hawaii, with an infinity pool, without the killer monkey it would be pure house porn. The synth score is fantastic, part of its throwback charm, and someone even finger-drums the tune of Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight, which has to be a reference to that Cadbury’s advert with the drumming gorilla.

The film is directed by Johannes Roberts, who in an ironic twist also directed 47 Meters Down. In that film being in the water was dangerous, in Primate the water is a sanctuary. Ben’s hydrophobia (a symptom of rabies that makes it seem even more like a fictional disease, giving him a weakness) means the girls stay safe in the pool. An issue being that when they girls are soaking wet they all look pretty much the same. They could also just splash Ben with water to make him go away but never do. It’s a film where if the heroes had water guns they’d be unstoppable.

It does feel like there’s a longer version of the movie on the cutting room floor. The film sets things up that never pay off. There’s some early conflict between the girls that never goes anywhere (Hannah introduced as the character to hate then out of nowhere becomes the one with the most sense) and some lusting over a boy that never amounts to much. Does the main character have to work through anything? Not really. At the beginning it seemed like it would be a meditation on grief, like 95% of recent horror movies, with a mention of her dead mother. Maybe the chimp represents her feelings towards her mother! Killing the chimp frees her of any guilt! But no, it’s ultimately not about that. It’s not fair to say it’s a film about nothing, however. It’s about a monkey going fucking mental.

Maybe the ending could have been stronger, the family surviving with no repercussions for the deaths they caused by having a chimp wander around the house and not even preparing their guests for it. The younger sister, bitten by a rabid monkey early on in the film, could have at least expressed symptoms herself, going nuts and biting people in the ambulance. I say bring on Primate 2: Primates. This time it’s war. This time there’s more. Or turn the franchise into a straight legal drama, a ninety minute litigation battle where they get sued by the victims’ families and laws restricting chimp ownership get stuck in congress.