"Infested" (2023) Saturday Monster Movies

A good horror movie always has more going on than what creeps across the floorboards. Infested (Vermines), a 2023 French thriller about a spider outbreak in a low-income Parisian apartment complex, is a tight, nerve-rattling ride. But the more I think about it, the more it becomes clear: the spiders were never the real threat.

They’re just doing what spiders do.

The true terror in Infested comes not from the arachnids themselves, but from the setting, a decaying, neglected housing block, and from the systems that wall its residents in and leave them to die. The building is falling apart before the first spider ever skitters across a tile. Residents like Kaleb and his sister Manon are already navigating broken relationships, economic hardship, and institutional indifference. The infestation is only the final stressor in a long-festering collapse.

When the authorities finally respond, they don’t help. They seal the building. Power is cut. No one comes in. No one gets out. The residents are left to face something they don’t understand, in the dark, literally and figuratively. It’s not the spiders who trap people. It’s the lockdown, the failing infrastructure, and the cold bureaucracy that treats poor people like collateral.

In that environment, of course the spiders become deadly. They multiply in the shadows and burst from vents. They are the horror element, yes, but they are shaped by the context, not acting in a vacuum. Just like any social issue that’s been left to fester.

Infested joins a small but potent tradition of urban horror that isn’t just about monsters. (Attack the Block, Candyman, etc.) It’s about how monsters emerge when people are cut off, ignored, and left without options. The residents resort to flashlights, fireworks, and bare hands. Makeshift survival tactics, just like in real life when the systems designed to help you are either absent or hostile.

But it’s the ending that lingers. Kaleb survives. He’s no longer in the building. He’s no longer hunted or desperate. And when a spider appears, crawling gently onto his shoulder, he doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t crush it. He just breathes it away.

This is not a triumph of domination. It’s not even a warning. It’s a reframe. The spider, outside the ghetto of that sealed-off building, is not a monster. It never really was.

The true danger was isolation. It was fear in the dark. It was a community treated as disposable.

Maybe that’s the final message: when we stop locking people away, when we start seeing clearly and acting with compassion, even the things we feared most turn out not to be so deadly after all.