Pity Peter (Woody Norman), the young poppet caught in the middle of Cobweb. He is being bullied at school and banned from trick-or-treating by his creepy parents (Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr), who are given to cryptic announcements (“Not everything is as sweet as it seems”) when they aren’t locking him in the cellar. Digging in his garden, he finds a skull just below the soil. As if that weren’t bad enough, the pumpkin crop is showing signs of blight. No one could blame the lad for looking forward to consoling chats with the female voice coming from within his bedroom wall, urging him to fight back against his tormentors like the boy in Let the Right One In.
On the plus side, Peter has a kindly teacher (Cleopatra Coleman) who clearly models herself on Miss Honey from Matilda, and shows up on his doorstep after the boy draws a self-portrait captioned: “Help Me”. There is also a home invasion by masked intruders, while the arachnid-related threat promised by the title materialises in the shape of a creature to which the old saying “It’s more afraid of you than you are of it” manifestly does not apply.
