PLOT: Tenants at Paradiso Palms apartments fight a deadly spider invasion while the cunning building manager might be their only hope for survival.
REVIEW: If there’s anything we need more of, it’s horror movies with spiders. As someone who grew up being haunted by Arachnophobia and even the silliness of Eight-Legged Freaks, I’ve always felt they worked well in horror, whether taken seriously or not. And honestly, the more unrealistic, the more entertaining they are, as real spiders certainly wouldn’t be targeting humans in the way they often do within the genre. And since I always love a horror film that traps victims in with something that can kill them, Crawlers felt like it was right up my alley.
Crawlers follows Serena (Lutz), the manager for a rundown apartment building, as she contends with the place being put on lockdown after a dead body is found. What they initially think could be a deadly virus turns out to be even deadlier spiders, and the apartment dwellers must band together to survive against them. And these aren’t just normal spiders: they are out for blood in a very serious way and will do whatever they can to kill everything in their path. They spread by inserting their eggs into victims when biting them, because the venom that could murder you in minutes wasn’t quite scary enough.
I feel the need to point out that Crawlers has a VERY similar plot to a French film from 2023 called Infested, where a building gets locked down due to an exotic spider outbreak. Whereas that film went full horror, providing one of the scariest films of the decade, Crawlers goes a more light-hearted, humorous route that doesn’t always work. It’s going more for entertainment than any scares rooted in reality. The spiders here are essentially sentient, with a much larger “lead” spider seemingly ordering them around. Reminded me a bit of Arachnophobia, but there’s no denying its silliness.
There are some absolutely incredible moments of tension, like a spider dropping down towards someone’s mouth while they’re sleeping or one hiding in a bag of chips while someone reaches in for food. There’s also a baby in one of the apartments, so I found myself uncomfortably shifting in my seat whenever they show them once the spiders have been released. They really take advantage of the creepy crawlies. And the fact that everyone is trapped in this building makes them even more intimidating.
Matilda Lutz made a name for herself back in 2017 with Revenge, and I feel like I’ve been waiting for her to break out big since then. The credits essentially make the point that Lutz’s Serena is the only important character, and that’s only cemented by the fact that everyone else is just a generic stereotype. They also make incredibly dumb decisions that could have easily been avoided. Hell, people who should be the authority on how dangerous these spiders are, put themselves needlessly in danger out of pure ignorance. It makes it hard to root for anyone. Even Serena is mostly just very lucky, narrowly avoiding getting bitten by the spiders.
The kills can be quite brutal as the spider bites cause the bodies to break down so that they’re easier to eat. The only drawback is that they can start to feel like the same thing over and over. I believe this is why we end up getting so many off-screen kills and just end up coming across their webbed-up corpses. I’m not sure what it says that the best kill is one that doesn’t even involve any of the spiders. I guess I was just desperate for something other than someone getting bitten and then writhing in pain.
For the most part, the spider effects are well done, as the filmmakers really take advantage of shadow and silhouette to make them look even better. I just wish we had gotten a little more information about these spiders and what their capabilities are. Monsters are scarier when we know what they can and cannot do, as it makes them more grounded in reality. Instead, these spiders can just do whatever is needed for a given scene, taking away some of their scariness.
Crawlers is a decent enough time and an inoffensive way to spend a Friday night. It can be a little silly but I still ended up enjoying it in a “turn your brain off” sense. The characters are just so stupid that it’s hard to ignore their awful decision-making and the fact that their ignorance is often the cause of their death. But I’ll always dig a film that gives us spiders murdering folks.
Crawlers is playing in theaters starting October 16th, 2026.
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