Welcome to the 31 Days of Horror Redux, a month-long celebration of genre filmmaking. Last time around, I made the recommendations. This time, I will be watching 31 days of films that are completely new to me. I hope you will join me on this journey of discovery.
Day 10: Infested, directed by Sébastien Vaniček, and Sting, directed by Kiah Roache-Turner
Spiders. I hate ‘em. Always have. Always will. It’s a primal kind of fear. There is no rationality to it. They’re little bugs like any other little bug, and I don’t mind other little bugs. Don’t particularly want them in my home, but I’m not scared of them. Spiders, on the other hand, pure, paralyzing fear.
With that context, I will tell you a movie I enjoyed very much as a child and have gained a greater appreciation for as an adult is Frank Marshall’s Arachnophobia. So terrifying yet enthralling to me as a child that I even had a little routine for watching it: sit on the floor, pile up blankets all around as a protective wall and stuff them under the couch so there would be no place for spiders to hide, then keep on high alert. It felt equal parts dangerous and fun, which is why I think horror movies appeal to kids. Older now, I appreciate Marshall’s film as a campy throwback to the creepy fun of ‘50s B movies.
That brings us to this double feature of spider movies, both released this year. The French film Infested was released to Shudder, while Sting, an Australian-American production, was in theaters back in the spring. Both are emblematic of the best parts of a creature feature but also have some of the same problems that often plague these kinds of movies. Let’s start with the bad because I really liked both of these movies and want to spend more time talking about their positive qualities.
What makes a spider (or spiders – Infested is, predictably, about an infestation, while Sting is about a single spider) inherently scary? To my mind, they are small and fast, they can hide anywhere, obviously there is potential danger of their bite, and there is something unearthly about a creature with that many legs and eyes that moves the way they do.
Editor’s note: I’m actually freaking myself out a little bit right now just in typing this piece. There’s a small spider on my bookshelf that I keep around for mosquitoes – see, I do recognize their value – and I’m checking on him a little more often as I write these words.
Both films understand all of these aspects and make great use of them. The problem is that Screenwriting 101 says that to hold an audience’s interest, you must continually raise the stakes or increase the threat. Unfortunately, the filmmakers in both of these cases accomplish this by making the spiders bigger. That’s a mistake.
Yes, it’s gross to see a spider the size of a dog or a bear, but it’s not that scary. Their greatest advantage is that they are tiny and could be anywhere, and our homes are filled with little places for them to be. Both films wring tremendous amounts of tension out of this basic idea, but eventually, both lean into: The spiders are getting bigger! The bigger they get, the less scary the movies. None of this is to say that if a spider the size of a car were in my home right now I wouldn’t just have a heart attack and drop dead, but on film, it’s a little silly.
Okay, that’s my complaint. Now for the good stuff, which we’ll talk about individually since each film takes a unique approach to the same basic premise: a deadly spider ends up in an apartment building.
Infested is the superior film in that it is both scarier and thematically richer. Vaniček, who has already been tapped by Sam Raimi and Co. to handle the next installment of the Evil Dead franchise, is even able to smuggle some fairly potent political and cultural themes into his fright flick. There are sequences in this movie I literally watched through my fingers, and I even paused it once to give my poor heart a break.
The film follows Kaleb (Théo Christine), his sister, and their friends as they try to survive their tower block, clearly in a lower-income area of the city, being overrun with deadly spiders. Kaleb is a lover of exotic creatures and keeps various bugs and reptiles in his room. He buys a spider on the black market, brings it home, and all hell breaks loose. The opening of the film is a nice little homage to Arachnophobia.
Where the earlier film opens with scientists collecting specimens in a South American jungle, this film opens with smugglers in a Middle Eastern desert, a more culturally relevant reference point in France. Here, it works as a nice little metaphor for the opium trade and the way international drug rings disproportionately affect neighborhoods of color in the cities. If it seems I am reading too much into it, trust that film goes deeper into this metaphor than I am now.
Anyway, the spider gets loose and hides in a pair of shoes that Kaleb sells to a neighbor, and this is what I mean with the tension of a little spider that can hide anywhere. We know it’s in the shoe. It must be in the shoe. The terror is in wondering how the character will learn it is in the shoe. I won’t spoil it here, but it is creepy, surprising, and effective.
When that character’s body is found, the police are called. There is talk of a drug overdose, an infectious disease, maybe, and generally a lot of conspiratorial speculation. Eventually, the building is quarantined and the residents are forcibly kept inside, despite the deadly threat within. There’s a lot of good political allegory in this around the handling of the pandemic and the use of the police to violently suppress and oppress neighborhoods of color and poorer communities.
For the final 20 minutes or so, the spiders take a backseat to the police as the primary threat, and this is right around the time the spiders start to get really big – they reproduce quickly and each successive generation quadruples in size when it feels threatened. So, the end is not quite as strong as the beginning and middle passages, but as a whole, it all works. Frankly, any movie so terrifying that I have to pause it out of fear gets an ‘A’ in my book.
Sting does not rise to that level, but it is effective B movie fun that owes plenty to Arachnophobia but is even more indebted to another famous horror film. I will say right now that I saw the trailer for this movie and the marketing materials and had no idea even about the basic premise, so if you want to go in completely blind, stop reading now. Otherwise, we’re going to talk about what went down in some detail.
Alright, everybody ready? It’s an alien. The spider is an alien. It lands in this apartment building as a tiny little meteor that arrives as part of a passing meteor shower. This suggests the possibility of a full-scale invasion, but this movie wisely confines itself to this single apartment building. A young girl finds the spider – the creature, in look and mannerisms, is exactly like a spider – and takes it home as a pet. Then it starts doing a lot of things spiders can’t do, like whistling, opening the jar it’s kept in from the inside, and growing in size every time it eats.
Eventually, it grows big enough that it’s hiding in the building’s ventilation system and sneaking from apartment to apartment, snatching prey. By this point, it’s pretty clear that the whole movie is a fairly faithful homage to the Alien franchise, particularly the first two films. We even get a chest burster sequence, and the way the spider ensnares its victims and saves them for later is exactly the same as it works in the Alien movies.
I don’t have a problem with any of that. It’s cool to set an Alien movie in an apartment building and to make the xenomorph a spider. But, like I said, the bigger it gets – and it gets big pretty quickly – the less scary it is because it takes it out of the realm of the real. It becomes a sci-fi movie, which is fun but not as frightening. The early sequences when the spider is still basically spider sized are the most effective in the movie.
There is a family drama at the center of the film about the girl and her step-father trying to get along that gives the story its emotional backbone, but it honestly probably takes up too much space. Also, the only people of color in this movie are weird caricatures handled poorly, so that’s not great. But overall, it’s a nice little B movie that’s worth the price of admission. Of course, none of this has made me like spiders more.
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