Crawlers (Grimmfest 2026)

While the mini revival of creature feature horror films may have its outliers like Johannes Roberts’ Primate, but it’s the arachnid who has been receiving the lion’s share of new movies. We’ve had Sébastien Vanicek’s audacious Infested, Kiah Roache-Turner’s interstellar Sting, and earlier this year Christopher Smith’s Spider Island — and that’s before delving into the depths of Prime and Tubi, where these movies propagate like no-one’s business. It’s never been a better time to be terrified of spiders, and now via Manchester’s Grimmfest we have another reason to be scared of dark corners with Ángel Gómez Hernández’s Crawlers.

The first thing on screen in Hernández’s new movie is a quote stating that every human is outnumbered by millions of spiders — a nice, skin-crawling way to set the stall for what is to come. From there, we find ourselves in a dank flat, where George (Chris Rogers) struggles with the heat and his fan struggles to draw air. Upon the wall is a map of the world with pins representing spiders; given how this scene has been set, you’d think this is some far-flung exotic corner of the world, but no, we are in a run-down block of flats somewhere in the USA. Then he collapses, and we see a huge, nasty-looking lesion on his back in full. Only this isn’t a medical issue; rather, it’s a nest for hundreds upon hundreds of spiders, and when the sore eventually pops, it causes hundreds of tiny arachnids to spill out before lunching on the unconscious George. From that strong cold open, we join our hero Serena (Matilda Lutz), a wannabe musician and the hired help of the building’s skeevy, duplicitous landlord. Her existence is a thankless one; every one of the tenants demands a great deal from her, yet they all treat her like the landlord’s incompetent lackey. After they find George’s dead body, the authorities put the building into quarantine, thinking his death was caused by a virus, leaving it up to an ensemble to deal with the threat of an arachnid menace who put people into paralysis before eating them. There’s the commonplace artist/streamer, a lawyer, an idiotic AI bro who presents himself as a tech genius, the brilliantly direct Lady Lash (Melina Matthews) — a sex worker who deals in all kink — a father and his baby, and a teenager with a broken leg.

Let’s be honest here: you don’t watch a movie like Crawlers for anything other than late-night entertainment and the promise of some fools getting themselves killed in a variety of cool ways by spiders. On that, I feel it hits the ground running a little bit too early as the back end isn’t as strong. We have the scene where George has a river of baby spiders leaking out of a wound in his back before they gorge themselves on his unconscious flesh. There’s another standout sequence in which an art live streamer is shooting at a canvas on his wall with a paint gun, and one of the viewers comments on the fact that his art is moving. Misconstruing that to mean the other “moving”, he goes on his merry way, only for him to end with spiders pushing his eyeball out of its socket as they leave his carcass. Other strong moments are more fleeting: there’s a good scene in the elevator that makes great use of silhouettes on the ceiling, and a scene in a shower room that subverts the idea that spiders can’t climb glass – no one said that didn’t apply to thousands of them at once. Moments aside, Crawlers starts better than it finishes.

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More impressive is the narrative cohesion with which the script has been written. There’s a phrase in narrative writing referred to as Chekhov’s Gun — if you see a dramatic item early on in a story, it has to pay off in the third act. One of my favourite examples of this in modern horror is Chekhov’s woodchipper in Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise. On this fact alone, Jayson Rothwell’s script for Crawlers crosses all of its T’s and dots its I’s to an endless and entertaining effect, as literally everything that is set up is paid off. This is the work of an efficient storyteller, and that may sound like a passing concern but when so many scriptwriters and filmmakers are guilty of being illogical and inconsistent, just closing the loop like Hernández and Rothwell’s movie has, it stands their work in great stead. Even if you can’t really spoil a killer spider movie, all I’ll say is any payoff involving Lady Lash is exquisite in its comic timing.

Matilda Lutz is a brilliantly relatable presence, equally at home as the sad-sack janitor as she is at playing the doggedly determined heroine — how she isn’t in more movies, I do not know. Seriously, indie America, cast Matilda Lutz more. The ensemble surrounding her brings their A-game too, and even if the movie runs at a mere 1 hour 21 minutes and way too many kills happen off screen, Crawlers manages to give all the significant players their moment to shine. Of those supporting players, I have to add that the AI girlfriend the tech bro has was rather effectively imitated by Diana Cruz; she gets everything down to the off-putting cadence perfect to the point that I wrongly assumed they made the character with AI. What I am saying here is don’t wantonly accuse of movies of employing AI, do you research.

As far as examples of this type of creature feature go, Hernández’s movie is certainly one of them, and please don’t misunderstand— movies like Crawlers know they aren’t big, nor are they clever (fridges don’t work like that). In fact, you’d probably forget it exists in a week if it wasn’t for Letterboxd. However, this is a hugely entertaining 81-minute diversion that makes genre film festivals such a joy to attend. Away from the confines of a film festival, allow me to paraphrase a friend: “when you’ve had a bad day at work, you aren’t reaching for Citizen Kane or The Godfather; no, you press play on movies like Crawlers”.

ROB’S ARCHIVE – CRAWLERS