SPIDERS!!!
Spiders are scary.
I realize that's not exactly a groundbreaking scientific observation, but it's true. There is something about those eight legs, those multiple eyes, those hairy little bodies, the way they move, the way they suddenly appear in places where you absolutely do not want them to appear, that just freaks people out.
You can be sitting quietly in your living room, perfectly relaxed, enjoying your evening, and suddenly a spider the size of a quarter runs across the floor. That's it. Evening ruined. You're now standing on a chair, armed with a rolled-up newspaper, trying to figure out whether you should kill the thing, capture it, or simply move out of the house.
And, of course, there are people who are genuinely terrified of spiders. The clinical term is arachnophobia, and it is one of the most recognizable specific phobias in the world.
There are all kinds of insect-related fears. Entomophobia is the general fear of insects. Myrmecophobia is the fear of ants. Katsaridaphobia is the fear of cockroaches, and melissophobia is the fear of bees.
Technically, spiders aren't insects at all. They're arachnids, which is a completely different classification, but I don't think the person screaming because there's a tarantula crawling up their leg is particularly concerned about the scientific distinction.
And what better way to exploit that fear than to make movies about it?
With the arrival of the new horror film Crawlers, which is in theaters now, I thought this would be a perfect time to look back at one of my favorite little corners of the horror genre: spider movies.
Spider movies have been around almost as long as movies themselves. In fact, one of the earliest examples of creepy-crawly cinema comes from the great Georges Méliès, the French filmmaking pioneer who practically invented cinematic trickery.
His 1896 short A Terrible Night features a man trying to sleep who is terrorized by an enormous bug crawling around his bedroom. It's a funny little film, but it also demonstrates something filmmakers figured out almost immediately: put a creepy, multi-legged creature somewhere it doesn't belong, and you've got an audience reaction.
During the silent era, spiders were frequently used as symbols of danger, manipulation and evil. Fritz Lang made a two-part adventure serial called The Spiders in 1919 and 1920, although that one was about a criminal organization rather than actual eight-legged monsters.
In 1943, Sherlock Holmes battled a particularly nasty villainess in The Spider Woman, in which a deadly spider becomes part of an elaborate murder scheme. Spiders were already associated with mystery, death and sinister behavior, but it wasn't until the 1950s that filmmakers really figured out what to do with them.
Make them enormous.
The 1950s were the golden age of giant monster movies, and I absolutely love those films. The atomic bomb had changed everything. Radiation was terrifying. Scientists were conducting experiments they probably shouldn't have been conducting.
Nuclear testing was creating all kinds of anxiety, and Hollywood decided that the logical result of all this scientific meddling would be enormous ants, grasshoppers, scorpions, praying mantises and, of course, spiders. Suddenly every creature that had previously been small enough to step on was now large enough to step on you.
And I couldn't get enough of them.
One of the absolute classics is Tarantula from 1955, a wonderful Universal science-fiction horror movie about an experimental growth formula that turns an ordinary tarantula into a gigantic monster roaming the Arizona desert.
The scientists are trying to solve the world's food shortage, which is a perfectly noble goal, but unfortunately their experiment produces a spider approximately the size of a Holiday Inn. That's the kind of scientific progress I enjoy watching in a movie.
I remember seeing Tarantula on television when I was a kid, usually on a Saturday afternoon, and loving every minute of it. The effects are terrific for the period, using an actual tarantula photographed against miniature landscapes to create the illusion of this enormous creature stomping around the desert.
It's a genuinely effective monster movie, and it was directed by Jack Arnold, who also gave us Creature from the Black Lagoon, It Came from Outer Space and The Incredible Shrinking Man. Arnold was one of the great directors of 1950s science fiction, and he understood how to make these ridiculous premises work.
Then there was Bert I. Gordon's Earth vs. the Spider in 1958, another glorious giant-spider movie that I remember watching on television and later seeing on programs like Svengoolie.
Gordon, who was affectionately known as Mr. B.I.G., specialized in movies featuring enormous creatures, and Earth vs. the Spider is a wonderful example of the form.
Teenagers discover a gigantic spider living in a cave, the authorities try to destroy it, and naturally everything goes wrong. At one point, rock-and-roll music helps bring the monster back to life. Because apparently giant spiders are also fans of teenage dance music.
By the 1960s and 1970s, spider movies had started getting stranger, nastier and considerably more exploitative.
There was Horrors of Spider Island from 1960, a wonderfully bizarre combination of monster movie, sexploitation and low-budget nonsense.
Jack Hill's Spider Baby, released in 1967, wasn't really about actual spiders but featured a deeply disturbed family whose members engage in some very spider-like behavior. It's a great, twisted cult movie with Lon Chaney Jr. and Sid Haig, and another reminder that the spider could be used as something more than a giant monster.
Then the environmental horror movies arrived.
The 1970s were filled with movies about nature striking back against humanity. Pollution, pesticides, chemical experiments and environmental destruction became the explanations for why animals were suddenly attacking people. We had killer bees, killer frogs, killer rats, killer worms and just about every other creature imaginable. And, naturally, we had killer spiders.
The Giant Spider Invasion from 1975 is one of the great drive-in movie oddities, featuring giant spiders, meteorites, bizarre scientific explanations and a famously ridiculous monster created with the assistance of a Volkswagen.
That same year brought Kiss of the Tarantula, a terrific little grindhouse horror film that's basically the spider version of Willard. Instead of a lonely guy controlling rats, we get a disturbed young woman with an unusual relationship with tarantulas. It's nasty, weird and exactly the kind of exploitation movie that made the 1970s such a wonderful decade for horror fans.
There was also Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo in 1977, a completely ridiculous television movie about deadly spiders arriving in the United States aboard a cargo plane. And then, also in 1977, came one of my absolute favorites: Kingdom of the Spiders.
Oh, I love Kingdom of the Spiders.
William Shatner stars as a veterinarian in rural Arizona who discovers that tarantulas are attacking livestock because their natural food supply has been disrupted by pesticides.
Naturally, the spiders begin multiplying, organizing and attacking the local population. And naturally, everybody is worried about what this is going to mean for the upcoming county fair. Because when thousands of deadly tarantulas are invading your town, you've really got to think about the fair.
Shatner is at his Shatneriest in this movie, and I mean that as a compliment. He's wonderfully over-the-top, the dialogue is frequently hilarious, and the whole thing has that marvelous 1970s drive-in atmosphere.
But here's the thing: the spider sequences are actually creepy. They used an enormous number of real tarantulas, and there are scenes where the creatures are crawling all over people, cars, buildings and everything else.
And the ending is fantastic. It's incredibly bleak. The spiders win. The entire landscape is covered in webs, and humanity appears to be completely screwed. What a great ending for a movie that spends so much time worrying about the county fair.
By the 1980s, spider movies were still turning up, including strange international efforts like the Italian horror film The Spider Labyrinth from 1988, which combines spiders, cults and surreal supernatural imagery. But in 1990, the subgenre suddenly became a major mainstream Hollywood attraction with Frank Marshall's Arachnophobia.
Produced by Amblin Entertainment, with Steven Spielberg serving as an executive producer, Arachnophobia starred Jeff Daniels and John Goodman and was marketed as a combination of horror and comedy. It introduced a particularly aggressive species of spider from South America that makes its way to a small California town and begins reproducing.
The movie was a hit, and for a lot of people it's probably still the first title that comes to mind when they think about spider movies. It certainly helped make the word arachnophobia part of everyday moviegoing conversation.
But I have to admit something: I'm not a particularly big fan of Arachnophobia. I know people love it, and I understand why. The spider effects are excellent, John Goodman has some funny moments, and the concept is terrific. But I don't think the mixture of comedy and horror works particularly well, and I never found the human story especially interesting.
Now, I absolutely love Eight Legged Freaks from 2002.
Directed by Ellory Elkayem and starring David Arquette and Kari Wuhrer, Eight Legged Freaks is a loving, goofy, very funny tribute to the giant-monster movies of the 1950s. Toxic waste causes spiders to grow to enormous proportions, and before long an Arizona town is being overrun by giant jumping spiders, giant tarantulas and giant web-spinning monsters.
It's big, silly, fast-paced and completely aware of how ridiculous it is. Arquette is hilarious, Wuhrer is terrific, and the movie has exactly the right attitude toward its material. It isn't embarrassed to be a giant-spider movie. It celebrates being a giant-spider movie.
The 2000s also brought a flood of lower-budget spider movies, helped along by the increasing availability of computer-generated effects. Some of these things are almost unbelievably cheap and ridiculous, which is part of their charm.
There were movies like Spiders, Spiders II: Breeding Ground, Arachnid, Ice Spiders and the wonderfully titled Creepies, a straight-to-video monster movie about mutant spiders escaping from a secret military facility. Because, as we all know, if there's one thing the military enjoys doing, it's creating enormous mutant creatures that will eventually escape and kill everybody.
There was Arachnoquake, which combines spiders and earthquakes because apparently one disaster wasn't enough. There was Lavalantula, featuring fire-breathing spiders emerging from volcanic activity.
There was Spiders 3D, which had the added attraction of spiders coming directly at your face, and there was Big Ass Spider! from 2013, a movie whose title tells you pretty much everything you need to know.
But something interesting has happened over the last few years. Spider movies have started getting genuinely frightening again.
In 2023, French filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček made Infested, originally titled Vermines, and it is one of the most effective spider horror movies I've seen in years. Released in the United States in 2024, it takes place in a rundown French apartment building where an exotic spider escapes and begins reproducing at an alarming rate.
Before long, the entire building is crawling with the things, and the residents are trapped inside, desperately trying to survive. Infested is absolutely terrifying.
What makes it so effective is that Vaniček doesn't treat the spiders as a joke. They're fast, aggressive and horribly unpredictable, and the film uses the cramped hallways, stairwells and apartments to create a genuinely suffocating atmosphere.
I thought it was one of the best horror films of 2024, and it made me very excited about Vaniček as a filmmaker. He went on to direct this year's Evil Dead Burn, which tells you that other people in the horror business were paying attention, too.
And now we have Crawlers, which takes that apartment-building nightmare and runs with it.
The similarities to Infested are pretty obvious, and I find it difficult to imagine that the filmmakers weren't at least aware of that movie. But that doesn't mean there isn't room for another variation on the idea. After all, Hollywood spent decades making giant spiders attack small towns, and I never got tired of those.
The wonderful thing about spider movies is how many different forms they can take. That's not even counting all the great spider-like creatures that have turned up in movies that aren't specifically about spiders.
There's Shelob, the ancient monstrous spider that attacks Frodo in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. There's Aragog, the enormous spider living in the Forbidden Forest in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. There's the gigantic mechanical spider in Barry Sonnenfeld's Wild Wild West, operated by Kenneth Branagh's villain, Dr. Arliss Loveless.
There are the multi-legged alien war machines in Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, the monstrous alien bugs in Starship Troopers, and all kinds of spider-related creatures in animated films, including James and the Giant Peach, A Bug's Life and the Spider-Verse movies.
Spiders are everywhere in the movies. And I love them.
So, in honor of Crawlers, and in celebration of one of the most entertaining, creepy, silly and occasionally genuinely horrifying subgenres in movie history, I've put together a list of my favorite spider movies.
Some are classics. Some are ridiculous. Some are genuinely great horror films. And some are so gloriously goofy that I can't help loving them.
They all have one thing in common: eight-legged creatures doing things that eight-legged creatures really shouldn't be doing.
Here, are my 10 favorite movies about spiders.
10 GREAT SPIDER MOVIES (in chronological order):
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