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Infested (2023)

  • ️Thu May 09 2024

Infested (2023) (Film)

Infested (original title Vermines) is a 2023 French horror thriller film directed by Sébastien Vaniček and co-written by Vaniček and Florent Bernard.

A young man named Kaleb lives in a building in a low income housing suburb of Paris. He's having a conflict with both his best friend and sister, and he's fond of exotic animals. One day, he acquires a small venomous spider, which soon escapes the box Kaleb put it in and reproduces in abnormally massive numbers. The building quickly becomes inundated with spiders, and the district is soon put on lockdown. Unable to escape, Kaleb and his friends will have to fight for survival, especially as the spiders start abnormally growing in size.

The film is available on horror-dedicated streaming platform Shudder in the USA. Not to be confused with the 2011 documentary series (about Real Life bug infestations), the 2016 video game, or the Working Title of Ticks.

Vermines provides examples of the following tropes:

  • The Aloner: Kaleb himself.
  • Artistic License – Biology: Several artistic liberties are taken with arachnids in order to tell a horror story about killer spiders:
    • Spiders the size of the ones in the movie would suffocate under their own bodyweight in accordance with the square cube law.
    • The spiders used in the film are Huntsman spiders, not spiders in the Sicariidae family as the film claims.
    • Spiders in the Sicariidae family are also not aggressive, with members only biting if crushed or otherwise threatened.
    • Sicariidae venom does not function like the venom of the spiders in the movie. Sicariidae venom is dermonecrotic and hemolytic, causing necrosis in the tissue surrounding the bite and breaking down red blood cells. The deaths in the movie are more consistent with a powerful neurotoxin like those contained in Funnel-web spider venom.
  • Big Creepy-Crawlies: The spiders grow abnormally large over time.
  • Cobweb Jungle: Entire corridors of the building are filled with cobwebs over time.
  • Explosive Breeder: Over the course of the film, the spider infestation dramatically escalates from a few individuals to thousands of spiders.
  • Kill It with Fire: At one point, someone throws a Molotov Cocktail in a corridor full of spiders to try stopping them.
  • Mercy Kill: When a smuggler in the desert gets bitten while gathering the spiders, his partner kills him with a machete before the venom can take effect.
  • Spider Swarm: The spiders reproduce in large enough numbers to completely overwhelm an apartment building.
  • Spiders Are Scary: A particularly venomous and invasive species of spider is brought to France. They reproduce in massive numbers, their venom kills rapidly, and they grow abnormally big over time.
  • SWAT Team: A squad from an elite French police force (either RAID or GIGN) respond to the chaos brought on by the spider infestation.
  • Tagline: "N'y allez pas seul" (French for "Don't go there alone").