Here’s a list of skin-crawling bad bug movies designed to make you scream

It’s easy to figure out why insects make many people’s skin crawl. Bugs, those small, alien, herd-like fiends that fear us more than we fear them but nevertheless find their ways into our secret spots, mutating and morphing and breeding and biting and generally making our lives miserable.

Horror movies have exploited our hard-wired entomological revulsion for almost a century, their physical representation adapting (like insects adapt) to the times and mirroring our innate cultural fear of “the other.”

This morning, this writer stepped into the shower only to be greeted by one of those vulgar, house centipedes that almost look like vermin when they gallop away from things they deem to be a threat. Now, these creatures are harmless and normally I try to usher insect invaders back outside to start fresh lives free of human domesticity. But there’s something about these critters that just makes me… snap.

And we’re sure that you too have a sort of bug that makes you scream.

Here then, in honor of my centipede run-in this morning, are 10 random horror and science fiction films that exploit our fear of bugs, whether giant, radiated, super-intelligent or, in the cases of at least two of the films, invasive of our very genetic make-ups.

Get the Raid and reveal your own favorite bad bug movies in the comments section below…