Crawlers

by Hope Madden

Is Crawlers the best arachnid horror movie ever made? No. It’s not the best arachnid horror movie made in the last couple of years. Did I nearly scratch myself raw watching it, certain I had spiders crawling on me? And did I have a nightmare later that I was looting a shoe store trying to find tie-up boots for my son to protect him from the spider invasion?

Yes, to both.

So, obviously director Ángel Gómez Hernández was doing something right as he traps us for 90 minutes in a quarantined 4-floor LA apartment building very recently overrun with spiders. Not just any spiders. Spiders that, as clarified by the opening title cards, have decided to eat people.

Decided. They decided this. But you know what? Writer Jayson Rothwell’s lack of imagination here frees us up to spend more time where we want to spend it. And if you’ve chosen to see a movie where an apartment building full of tenants is trapped inside with thousands of killer spiders, my guess is that you want to see some nasty spider business. Crawlers has it.

Matilda Lutz (Revenge) is Serena, the put-upon would-be musician/building super, who finds the first body. It looks bad, so the police put the building on lockdown until they can figure out what kind of virus took out George (Chris Rogers). And then once they realize it was no virus, they drape the building so nothing goes in or out, just as Serena’s neighbors are starting to see evidence of the infestation.

It’s a great way to build tension. And we’ve spent just enough time with the tenants to root for some to survive, and root for others to get into that elevator. And the film’s CGI is believable enough that I was forever scratching and swatting in my seat.

There’s little underneath the basic story, so you’ll have to make do with surface level tension and character development. For more visual panache, check out Kia Roache-Turner’s 2024 terror Sting, and for more visceral scares with character, Sébastien Vanicek’s Infested makes every move Crawlers makes and does it better.

But those movies are not on the big screen right now, and if you want to be in a dark room full of skittering, hungry spiders, Crawlers delivers the creeps.