There is a lot of cinema in which spiders are an element of circumstantial chills. From the Indiana Jones movies to the first James Bond movie, they have always been a good button to press, taking advantage of our natural instinct to repel bugs. Some people have it more accentuated than others, but what is certain is that people with arachnophobia should not go see ‘Vermin: the plague‘, unless you want to have the worst time of your life.
And it’s not to raise the alarm to create a headline, it’s just that there are people who love horror movies who avoid movies with spiders and You can find here something more than nightmares but a panic that can lead to a real bad time in a dark room. The Sitges passes were especially revealing, with screams and the collective feeling of suggestion: it seemed like there were spiders in the room. That’s the power of a horror movie that successfully achieves what it sets out to do.
A tradition that needed fresh blood
The rest of the viewers with a certain tolerance for seeing little legs and hairs have the opportunity to have the best time ever with the sensation, because this is the best movie about spider invasions since ‘Arachnophobia’ and ‘Arac Attack’ from 22 years ago, which, In some way, they are the foundation on which this new iteration of the subgenre is built. The common situations are not exactly hidden. For example, The starting point of Rob Marshall’s film is very similara trip to a foreign land brings with it an exotic and very dangerous spider.
It also has a terrarium fan at the beginning of everything, like that of Ellory Elkayem, in which in addition to multiplying, The specimens grew and grew without control without needing much food, the most fantastic and unreal point of this new film, which escalates its threat without any qualms about posing an impossible situation beyond verisimilitude. But it doesn’t matter, Sebastien Vanicek knows that we have come to play and offers us a complete amusement park.
Of course, it uses all the tricks of the infestation cinema code, from ‘Tarantula’ (1977) to ‘Deadly Burden’ (1997), even reproducing one of the gags that has given viewers the most nightmares for three decades, the ‘Arachnophobia’ sneaker moment. In recent years, giant spider movies have proliferated, and they have relied on large monsters that barely tickle. The case of the modestItsy Bitsy‘ (2019) is notable, as it used an animatronic that was gloomy in itself, but it lacked a point of creativity in the staging.
Class consciousness and flamethrower
‘Vermin’ not only achieves a great combination of art direction, use of real spiders and impressive CGI, but It provides a social element absent in all previous versions. At its starting point, with a quarantined building, with the police preventing the neighbors from leaving, it is very reminiscent of ‘Rec’ (2007), but there is an ethnic element that takes the problem to one of the poor neighborhoods of Paris, to the point that it seems like a possible fantastic extension of recent films like ‘Les Misérables’ or ‘Athena’, with the same type of characters, hip hop music, the same presumption of law enforcement as an enemy of all ages.
That stands out the ease of French genre authors such as Vanicek or Bustillo/Maury in portraying neighborhood environments as if they knew them, while in Spanish films like ‘Asedio’ it is hard to believe the microcosm they represent. However, the proposal does not use the location to launch great sermons, it is rather, as in ‘Attack the Block’, an ingredient that gives color, attitude and more empathy towards the protagonists, following a very Carpenter or Romero trail in which Somehow it is the working class that takes the brunt of any catastrophe, even if it is an alien, zombie, or murderous arthropod invasion.
The script never loses sight of the playful aspect, for the most part an escape against the clock film, the perfectly orchestrated horror scenes, such as the one in the shower or the even more difficult one in the hallway, leaving an action dessert with excellent special effects. It is difficult to criticize a work so committed to shocking and frightening and for that reason ‘Vermin: the plague’ is the first of the great horror films of the yearthe European response to Blumhouse’s usual telegraphed releases where it is increasingly difficult to find surprises.
