SQUARED TO DEATH

DIRECTOR VINCENZO NATALI EXPLAINS HOW THE SHOOT FOR '90S PUZZLE-HORROR CUBE NEARLY KILLED HIM - BOTH FIGURATIVELY AND LITERALLY...

- SIMON BLAND

BUILT ON A PREMISE as concise as its title, claustrophobic psychological horror Cube did a whole lot with very little. It introduced us to a group of strangers who wake to find themselves trapped in their own cube-shaped prisons. Before they can figure out who has caged them and why, their mystery cubes start fighting back, punishing each incorrect escape attempt with vicious booby traps and inventive and frequently bloody kills.

27 years later, the afterlife of director Vincenzo Natali's debut remains as alluring as ever. Spawning two direct sequels and a Japanese remake, its fingerprints can be found all over the gore-flecked "consequence horrors" of the early noughties. In hindsight, it feels like Cube sliced so that films like James Wan's Saw franchise could dice - a pretty apt and deserving legacy for a movie that was so tricky to make it nearly killed its director.

"What really excited me about the idea for Cube was that I felt like I hadn't seen it before," Natali tells SFX, casting his mind back to when he first stumbled upon the idea as a movie-bingeing film student at the Canadian Film Centre. Inspired by minimalist classics like Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat and Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, Natali's initial thought process led him into surreal territory before he landed on the lean simplicity that made Cube a cult hit.