Spiders. They’re not exactly the most-loved of creatures, and most people would choose to jump into a cage with a lion over being stuck in a room with even the tiniest spider. However, if you do have a fear of spiders, it’s fairly likely that it’s because of the venomous monsters of cinema. Whether it be the nineties comedy-horror Arachnophobia or recent spider horror Infested and Sting, you can bet the movies had a hand in making your hair stand up whenever you see anything with more than six legs.
But just how realistic are these arachnid horrors, and should we actually be worried? I spoke to Dr. Catherine Scott, who studies spider ecology and behavior at McGill University in Montreal, about spiders in horror and the real-life behavior of the beasties. “There are very few positive depictions of spiders,” she says, “and it bugs me that when spiders are villains, they tend to either have traits that are exaggerated to make them more scary or have completely made up biology.”
The atomic age caused spiders to grow to huge proportions, with 1955’s Tarantula and 1958’s Earth vs. the Spider. Even Toho got in on the act in Son of Godzilla (1967), where the Big G had a showdown with monster spider Kumonga. This begs the question: Just how big do spiders get?
The biggest spiders grow to a leg span of twelve inches, with both the South American Goliath Birdeater and the Australian Giant Huntsman reaching that size. People got excited a few decades ago when what was believed to be a spider fossil with a twenty-inch leg span was discovered. It turned out it had been mistakenly identified as a spider when it was actually a sea scorpion. Dr. Scott calls the very idea of giant-size spiders “ridiculous,” but why can’t they grow to the size of a tank? Oxygen. Spiders’ lungs are less efficient than ours, so they would struggle to get enough oxygen to support their exoskeleton at gigantic sizes.
While the idea of enormous spiders is quite terrifying, many filmmakers know that they can be even scarier when they’re at a fairly normal size. Spiders just can’t help interacting with human spaces, especially when it’s cold, or they’re horny for a mate, so they’ll come into our houses and mostly won’t be seen at all.
But there’s always the occasion where they’re caught scuttling across the floor at high speeds, and this is what spider horror movies use by turning that dial up even further to say, “What if that spider is the deadliest species ever?”
The cinematic answer is usually the tarantula. They’re colorful, fairly easy to control, and they grow to large sizes so they look good on camera. A host of spider horrors popped up in the ’70s, and they all utilized the photogenic qualities of tarantulas.
William Shatner battled an army of them in 1977’s Kingdom of the Spiders, while Claude Akins and Tom Atkins smuggled sacks of tarantula-infested Mexican coffee beans in Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo that same year. 1975’s The Giant Spider Invasion had tarantulas falling from the sky in geodes, and Kiss of the Tarantula had the neat idea of a young girl with an army of pet spiders. Even Lucio Fulci got in on the arachnid action with 1980’s The Beyond, featuring a scene allowing the director to further indulge his eye trauma fetish during a spider attack.
And, of course, there’s 1990’s Arachnophobia, the film that many see as the ultimate spider horror. An ad campaign for the film name-dropped Jaws and Alien, and it’s easy to understand why (especially with it being an Amblin picture, Steven Spielberg executive producing while his long-time colleague Frank Marshall directed).
The movie effectively uses the audience’s fear of spiders by once again placing these creatures into our own small-town environment, resulting in the creepiest shower scene since Psycho. It may surprise you that Arachnophobia is Dr. Scott’s favorite spider film: “I actually really enjoy it,” she says, “but I consider it a comedy. Nothing about it is scary to me because it is so silly, but I know that without the knowledge I have of spider biology, it would be absolutely terrifying.”
Arachnophobia works because it takes the theme of foreign invasive species and takes it beyond the point of logic, but to a point where people can still buy into it. It uses both tarantulas and smaller, more agile spiders through the conceit that a deadly Venezuelan spider mates with your standard house spider, even going so far as to include a tender post-coital shot.
This creates a strain of super-spiders and is possibly the most unrealistic thing in the picture. “Two species as distantly related as a tarantula and a common house spider could never mate and produce viable offspring,” says Dr. Scott. “They almost certainly would not physically be able to mate – the male’s sperm transfer organs only match with the genitalia of females of the same species.”
The spider used in Arachnophobia to play the main “villain,” the “General,” was the Goliath, with small huntsman spiders as the offspring. The film also misleads by suggesting that spiders can have a caste system, like bees, with the General, a queen, and foot soldiers. And that’s before the spider screeches like a Xenomorph.
Interestingly enough, there is a biological precedent in this with a method called stridulation, where spiders can rub parts of their legs together to make a hissing sound to ward off predators. However, they don’t generally end up sounding like Rob Halford.
The spiders in Arachnophobia kill instantly, and while that presents a great amount of threat for a narrative, it’s also absolutely false. “No real spider would ever attempt to attack and eat a human,” assures Dr. Scott. “Spider venom is for immobilizing prey or defense. Spiders don’t feed on human blood in real life, so defense is the only reason for them to bite.” This narrative is also a big problem with movies featuring tarantulas, as there has never been one recorded human death from the species.
Of course, there are spiders out there that can kill a human when antivenom is not readily available. According to the Australian Museum, even the Sydney Funnelweb (the most venomous spider in the world) hasn’t caused a death in decades due to the availability of an antivenom.
One supremely creepy idea is that spiders use humans as host bodies. 1987’s The Believers featured an urban legend where a boil appears on someone’s skin before bursting to release thousands of tiny spiders. Likewise, this year’s Infested had spiders emerging from bodies Alien-style. Thankfully, spiders cannot do this; they need oxygen for their babies to survive and won’t get that inside your body. That said, plenty of other things will happily lay eggs inside you, including the botfly and the pinworm. Gross.
So you can see there is no real logical reason to have a fear of spiders. Instead, perhaps we should be afraid of spiders going extinct – a terrifying proposition. “Spiders,” Dr. Scott says, “eat somewhere between four hundred and eight hundred million metric tons of insects every year. That is a lot of bugs, many of which negatively impact humans, such as crop or forest pests or disease vectors. The effects on humans would be indirect, but I would expect impacts on food security and human health for sure. The world would also be a less beautiful place without spiders.”
