Anybody who knows me knows I don’t get scared while watching horror movies. That being said, Alien and Aliens are the two scariest movies I’ve ever seen. Any horror movie featuring the Xenamorphs is pretty scary. Another type of horror film that I tend to get scared of is films with scenes with big bugs or spiders. The latest horror movie featuring spiders, Infested, is one of the scariest horror films I’ve seen in recent memory. I was truly scared while watching this horror movie. 

I just want to say this before getting into this review. Don’t go to some foreign country and look for exotic or dangerous animals and bring them back to a population center or city. The other thing is who collects a bunch of creepy crawly bugs, frogs, snakes, scorpions, or other animals, and brings them back and puts them in your bedroom in an apartment building. That’s crazy! It’s not going to go very well for anybody. That is what the main character in Infested did. He wasn’t thinking about the repercussions of his actions.

The director Sébastien Vanicek, scared the hell out of me. He ramped up the scars by doing little things like having the main character put a poisonous spider in a shoe box. You knew watching that it was going to get out and wreak havoc on the inhabitants of this building he lived in. It was inevitable. Once one character got bit and died, it was downhill from there for the rest of the cast.

This film is a French film with subtitles, so that was something that stood out to me. I usually don’t get scared in horror films, but this one, which is a foreign film, found a way to scare the hell out of me. Little things like subtle camera movements, panning up or down, helped create suspense. Once you saw what was at the end of the shot, instant dread set in. I was completely creeped out and scared the entire time while watching this film.

There is some good character development stuff going on in this movie as well. The way the director gave the characters some good moments to interact with each other helped me care about them more. The relationship between the land character and his sister was genuinely very well thought out. The friends helped that as well. The cast can be hit or miss sometimes in horror films. These young people were pretty good. I didn’t want to see them die.

This year has had its fair share of very good horror films, but Infested is the scariest of them all so far. I like Late Night with The Devil quite a bit , but it doesn’t have the scare factor of Infested. Even Sting, another spider attack horror film, didn’t elicit the scares like this movie did. I had the hair on my arms and neck stand-up. That’s how scared I was while watching this film. It’s just how I am with creepy crawly bug movies. I’m sure I’m not the only one who was scared by the cringe factor of this horror movie.

Infested is the scariest horror film I’ve seen all year and in many years. I don’t get scared that often.  This one had me looking over my shoulder and wiping my face and hair. The hair on my arms and neck stood up. That’s a rarity for me. The cast was fine, but the backstory of the main characters was helpful in caring about them and their plight. The one take away from this film was don’t bring creepy crawly bugs back to a populated area or dwelling. It doesn’t bode well for anybody.

4 ½ stars

Dan Skip Allen