Within horror films there is a subgenre of B series not suitable for those who are truly terrified of spiders and other arachnids. From the classic Tarantula (1955), by Jack Arnold, through The Invasion of the Giant Spiders (1976) or the best-known and highest-grossing Arachnophobia (1990), by Frank Marshall, the big screen has not stopped scaring the staff by using one of those carnivorous creatures whose bite doesn’t exactly turn you into Spider-man.
The latest addition to the long list of titles that cause disgust is titled Vermin: the Plague and is directed by the young French debutant Sébastien Vani?ek. The film, which won the Special Jury Prize at the last edition of the Sitges Festival, follows the adventures of Kaleb, a thirty-something who lives in the suburbs of Paris and makes a living reselling expensive sneakers. He does not quite accept the death of his mother, his relationship with his sister is not going through the best moment and he has broken up with his best friend, with whom one day he dreamed of opening a zoo of exotic animals.
One day he buys a poisonous spider that he names Rihanna, but it escapes from the box and begins to reproduce, wreaking havoc among the residents of the building, which remains in quarantine. “Genre cinema was the best way to talk about the topic I wanted to address. Draw a parallel between the treatment we have of spiders and the racism towards young people in the suburbs,” the director tells this newspaper.
And Vermin: the plague, despite being a genre film, has a great social component. It was filmed in the 93rd district, “the place where I grew up and which has a very bad reputation because everyone believes it is very dangerous, since when we see those who live in these neighborhoods, we turn away or we want them out.” The filmmaker, who at the age of fifteen took over his father’s camcorder and began filming insects, chose spiders to talk about this problem “because people hate them when they find them at home. “I love them and I wanted to film them very close because every form of life is important.”
To give greater realism to a terrifying and claustrophobic survival story, he insisted on having real spiders, no special effects. “The species is called Heteropoda maxima and comes from South America. They need little space to live. We had to be very cautious and take care of them during the recording as if they were a dog,” recalls the director.
The actress Sofia Lesaffre had to do one of those scenes in which she is in the bathroom and a lot of murderous bugs start to sneak in. “It was very difficult for me at first because I have arachnophobia. “I talked a lot with Sébastien and the spiders’ caretaker and in the end we realized that they are very fragile beings,” she points out.
And between screams, corpses and giant spiders, a drama about loss and friendship emerges. “The film talks about the absence of dialogue between friends, between brother and sister, between young people and the police and this absence of dialogue is what causes problems and tension. In addition to being a film about spiders, it is also about characters, about Kaleb’s process of becoming an adult and how to move forward. In order to move forward we have to accept not only the good, but also the bad. Because if we close the door to the bad, we also close it to the good.”
Experienced in short films, the filmmaker insists that his debut film is above all about survival and one of his reference films has been Green Room (2015), about a music band locked in a room by the perpetrators of a homicide, and 28 days later, “where people end up being more dangerous than monsters.” He believes that there are more and more genre film proposals in France and hopes “that there will be more and more in the future to deal with human problems.”
