Spider in the Attic (2021)

UK. 2021.

Crew

Director/Screenplay – Scott Jeffrey, Producers – Scott Jeffrey & Rhys Waterfield, Photography – Jonathan Constantinou, Music – Andrew Fosberry, Visual Effects – Rhys Waterfield, Special Effects – Chelsea Murphy, Production Design – Fleur Calder. Production Company – Jagged Edge Productions.

Cast

Nicola Wright (Linda), Chelsea Greenwood (Belle), Sarah Alexander Marks (Lucy), Kate Sandison (Sam Jones), Danielle Scott (Lorena), Clint Gordon (Daniel), Chris Cordell (George Zizerman)

Plot

Linda is the host of a true crime radio show but is facing having the show rescheduled by her boss Sam Jones because of poor ratings. She is determined to get a scoop to prove herself. Linda’s daughter Lucy, who has just returned from service in the army, tells of George Zizerman, a scientist who was discredited for reviving Nazi experiments into creating genetically-engineered animals. Joined by Lucy and her other pregnant daughter Belle, Linda heads to Kent to try and get an interview with Zizerman. Sam and her assistant Lorena insist on coming too. When they find nobody home, they break in and find the house deserted and Zizerman’s corpse in the bed. They then discover that the house is overrun by spiders that have been genetically-engineered with alien DNA.

British director/producer Scott Jeffrey (also known as Scott Chambers) has become an incredibly prolific producer of genre material in the 2020s, having produced over 100 films since 2016 and directed 23 of them. His most well-known film ended up being Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2022), a horror take on the children’s character. The IMDB insists Spider in the Attic is directed by Shannon Holiday, the co-director of several other Scott Jeffrey produced films, Dragon Fury (2021) and The Mutation (2021), although Holiday’s name does not appear on the credits of the film, and the listed director is Jeffrey himself.

Spider in the Attic is a throwback to the bug film. This was at its heyday in the 1950s, a period that produced the likes of the killer ant film The Naked Jungle (1954) and then the giant atomic ant film Them! (1954). We were soon infested with the likes of Tarantula (1955), Beginning of the End (1957), The Black Scorpion (1957), The Deadly Mantis (1957) and Earth vs the Spider (1958) to belated stragglers like The Giant Spider Invasion (1975) and Empire of the Ants (1977). The 2000s brought Eight Legged Freaks (2002) where the genre was reworked with CGI effects, followed by a host of other low-budget bug films usually made for cable with the likes of Spiders (2000), Mansquito (2005), Locusts (2005), Swarmed (2005), Arachnoquake (2012), Big Ass Spider! (2013), Spiders (2013), Lavalantula (2015), Stung (2015) and the subsequent Jeffrey produced Spiders on a Plane (2024), among others. We haven’t seen much in the way of bug films, giant of regular sized, since the early 2010s so Spider in the Attic is somewhat of a throwback. (For a more detailed listing see Bugs).

Spider in the Attic has all the familiar hallmarks of a Scott Jeffrey film, including featuring a number of actors who have appeared in several of his other productions. It is contained to a single location – in this case, Pekes Manor House in Sussex, which has appeared as a location in several other Jeffrey’s films – H.P. Lovecraft’s Monster Portal (2022), Alien Invasion (2023). The spider effects are surprisingly good, given that this is a low-budget film.

Spider in the Attic (2021) — A spider in the attic

On the other hand, Jeffrey has not researched much about how radio broadcasting works. Nicola Wright is more like a true crime podcaster than someone hosting a radio show – such a show would probably not play in a major primetime slot on a commercial station. Moreover, being moved from an evening to a morning slot would actually be considered a boost in ratings rather than a demotion. And since when would the senior editor/HR person (?) go on location to the recording of a broadcast?

The critical failing of Spider in the Attic is that it is slow to go anywhere. After a prologue where we meet the scientist and see one of the spiders, it is half the film before we get more spiders. This section is taken up by B plots about Nicola Wright’s struggle to retain her radio job and hoping to land the big story and of pregnant Chelsea Greenwood trying to work things out with boyfriend Clint Gordon. They are domestic dramas that should be pushed to the back of a film, not the forefront, and are largely uninteresting. When the spiders do emerge, they never get to do much more than wander around the house and along the walls menacingly, but rarely get to attack anybody.

Scott Jeffrey’s other genre films as director are:- The Bad Nun (2018), Clowndoll (2019), The Final Scream (2019), The Watch 2 (2019), Cupid (2020), Don’t Speak (2020), Bats: The Awakening (2021), Cam Girls (2021), Cannibal Troll (2021), Curse of Humpty Dumpty (2021), Devil Djinn (2021), Dragon Fury (2021), Hatched (2021), HellKat (2021), The Mutation (2021), Beneath the Surface (2022), Exorcist Vengeance (2022), Kingdom of the Dinosaurs (2022), Firenado (2022) and Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025).