For every person on the planet, there are three million spiders. Wherever we are, we’re never more than three feet from one. And if those spiders one day decided to eat humans, our species would be wiped out within just one year.
These are the facts presented to us at the beginning of Crawlers — facts that become a horrifying reality for the tenants of Paradise Palms, a locked-down apartment block overrun with an infestation of venomous, rapidly multiplying spiders.
It’s undeniably a typical plot line for the creature feature subgenre. What makes Crawlers intriguing is the fact that director Ángel Gómez Hernández doesn’t choose the overdone ‘bigger is better’ approach (like Sting or Eight-Legged Freaks). Instead, he elects a more believable and arguably more terrifying angle: not giant spiders, but millions of tiny ones, as big as any you’d find in your own home. Even horror titans like M. R. James (“The Ash-tree”, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary) and Stephen King (“The Mist”, Skeleton Crew) couldn’t resist the larger than life.
This isn’t the only narrative element Crawlers strives to do differently. From a memorable cast of tenants that feel as overtly zany as characters from a 2000s Dark Castle horror, to a kink subplot that proves latex is surprisingly useful when facing an army of lethal creepy crawlies, there is a commendable sense of duty from the actors and director as they swing big to shock and entertain their audience. But, like most creature features, the more we see of our eight-legged antagonists, the less power and mystique they have to petrify us.
Perhaps Stephen King said it best when, in It, The Losers’ Club finally learns how to defeat their tormentor, Pennywise: “But a spider was, after all, only a spider. Perhaps at the end, when the masks of horror were laid aside, there was nothing with which the human mind could not cope.”
This is Crawlers in a nutshell: over-ambitiously fun, occasionally frightening, but ultimately a victim of the big reveal that’s always expected, but inevitably disappoints.
DISTRIBUTOR
Signature Entertainment
DIRECTOR
Ángel Gómez Hernández
SCREENPLAY
Jayson Rothwell
CAST
Matilda Lutz
Gary Stennette
Elena Sanz
DIGITAL
9 November 2026
DVD
14 December 2026
