Death Crawler

Death Crawler is the fifth episode of the second season of the thriller horror docudrama found-footage television series Lost Tapes. It originally aired on Animal Planet on October 20th, 2009 and was directed by Douglas Segal.

Plot
In Summer 2002, entomologists Karen and Jonah Urco became stranded on an uninhabited island due to engine trouble after spending their summer documenting various insects. While Jonah tried to fix the engine, Karen began exploring the jungle, discovering exceptionally large walking-sticks and tarantulas. She suddenly comes upon a human skeleton with a video camera clasped in its hand.

She takes the camera in search of an explanation of what happened to him, but does not immediately check the film. She brings Jonah into the jungle to see the skeleton, but Jonah is suddenly bitten by a gigantic centipede. He becomes ill almost immediately, and at their camp, Jonah tells her that the centipede was some three feet long, but Karen states that no centipedes of that size are known to exist and suggests that it may have been a snake, but Jonah insists that he was not wrong, pointing out that the wound is consistent with a centipede bite.

Hours later, after dark, he becomes extremely ill, suffering from a serious fever as his wound begins festering. Karen leaves the tent and suddenly sees a gigantic centipede near the tent. Looking for an explanation as to what this place is, she looks at the film on the camera, from around June 1999, which shows several Latin American men, possibly soldiers on a surveying mission, being attacked and killed by other giant centipedes. Seeing that the men on the tape had a medical kit with them, Karen returned to the jungle to find it, but hears hissing all around her.

She discovers the abandoned campsite and the medical kit, which she brings back to camp along with a machete. That night, a tropical storm strikes as she returns to help Jonah. While getting out her supplies, she sees the silhouette of a three-foot centipede on the side of the tent when lightning flashes, but manages to knock it off and prevents another centipede from entering the tent. She leaves the tent and hacks it up with the machete before trying to help Jonah into the boat. They stumble halfway to the boat, and Karen kills several more centipedes as they try to attack them.

Finally, they reach the boat and escape from the island. As they resolve to give up their search for new insect species, they suddenly hear all too familiar hissing in the boat. Their skiff washed up on the coast of Florida two weeks later. Karen and Jonah's bodies were still in the boat, decomposed and covered in puncture wounds and bite marks. The centipedes that had apparently climbed into the boat were never found, but a series of tracks in the sand leading from the boat to the brush were found on the scene. The location of the island that they found the centipedes on remains unknown.