Spiders. Why\u2019d it have to be spiders? Any of us who flinch at the sight of a spider can confirm the many legged arachnids are an easy source of terror. Most of us don\u2019t like finding them on our windowsills, crawling on our walls, or making thread-y homes of their own in forgotten crevices. They are our foes as much as any unwelcome pest\u2014even if they are helpful in keeping out other creepy crawlies. In S\u00e9bastien Vanicek\u2019s nightmarish feature debut \u201cInfested,\u201d there are more spiders than you can count and spiders of unusual size that weave together a frightfully stellar monster movie that will make many viewers jump, squirm, and maybe even scream.<\/p>\n
In Vanicek\u2019s film, a young man named Kaleb (Th\u00e9o Christine) collects a small menagerie of creatures and bugs in his room, much to the annoyance of his sister, Manon (Lisa Nyarko). While she\u2019s busy refurbishing their old apartment to sell after the death of their mother, Kaleb\u2019s future is less certain, and although many in his orbit think the worst of a hoodie-wearing young man with a side hustle of selling high-priced Nike shoes, he still tries to do what\u2019s right for his neighbors. However, his passion for housing rare species by his bedside brings chaos into the apartment complex when a poisonous spider escapes and begins to lay its eggs throughout the building, leaving Kaleb, Manon, and their friends Mathys (J\u00e9r\u00f4me Niel), Jordy (Finnegan Oldfield) and Lila (Sofia Lesaffre) to fight for their lives.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Our collective fear of spiders has manifested into its own horror subgenre. That includes the 1955 giant bug classic “Tarantula,” deadly spider infestation in a smalltown thrillers like \u201cKingdom of the Spiders\u201d and “Arachnophobia,\u201d the early aughts Blockbuster favorite “Eight Legged Freaks” and the aptly named “Big Ass Spider!” that followed kaiju-sized monsters quite simply too big to contain. Like its predecessors, \u201cInfestation\u201d taps into our fear (rational and irrational) about poisonous bites, quick moving spider colonies that set up webs over our homes, spiders becoming too big or deadly to control, and the unpredictability of their behavior\u2014as any kid tasked with killing a spider could attest.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But \u201cInfested\u201d feels somehow more intense as the threat is not just poisonous spiders or spiders of unusual size\u2014it\u2019s that they are simultaneously growing exponentially almost every time you see them on screen, they attack in packs, and their bite is pretty lethal. They will take up residence in a host\u2019s body then crawl out of their victim\u2019s skin. They capture others in their webs or conquer them in their own homes. No place is safe, and once the infestation sets in, the apartment building where Kaleb lives is put on police lockdown, trapping everything and everyone inside. In addition to the arachnid horror movies of yesteryear, Vanicek channels the camaraderie of \u201cAttack the Block,\u201d another invasion thriller where friends band together to fight off aliens, and the confined apartment terror of David Cronenberg\u2019s \u201cShivers,\u201d where parasite unleash violent sexual chaos in a posh complex.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Spiders. Why\u2019d it have to be spiders? Any of us who flinch at the sight of a spider can confirm the many legged arachnids are an easy source of terror. Most of us don\u2019t like finding them on our windowsills, crawling on our walls, or making thread-y homes of their own in forgotten crevices. They …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[48],"class_list":["post-1194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-horror-movies","tag-horror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}