“You have to understand why you’re afraid of spiders,” director Sébastien Vaniček tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “And as soon as you understand that, there is no reason to be afraid.”

If we can boil humanity’s near-universal fear of spiders down to one thing, it would probably be the way they move. Blessed with eight legs and as many eyes dotted all around their bodies, spiders are directionally unpredictable: They can scuttle forwards, backwards, or side to side without warning or reason, running away from us, around us, or towards us as we valiantly leap atop the nearest chair, shrieking in fear.

This is exactly the spider quality that was important for Vaniček to get right. His feature debut Infested premieres on Shudder this week after taking the 2023 Venice Film Festival by storm, and prompting frenzied headlines about the army of real spiders used to engineer the movie’s skin-crawling scares. It’s so scary it’s already landed Vaniček a gig directing an upcoming Evil Dead movie.

“I love small things and living things,” Vaniček enthusiastically explained in an interview with The Daily Beast. “It was a pleasure to film them in close-ups and have really immense insects on the big screen. They’re really interesting creatures. It’s so cool to film them like this and to make people able to see how interesting they are, how complex they........

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