Even the Spiders Had To Audition for ‘Arachnophobia’

If you’re going to make a creature feature, making spiders the villains is the easiest way to frighten an audience. Some have done it well, like this year’s Sting and Infested, along with 1977’s William Shatner-starring Kingdom of the Spiders. Some have gone for a more silly route, such as 2002’s Eight Legged Freaks. And then there’s the plethora of giant spiders made of bad CGI in little-seen movies over the last few decades. (Ice Spiders, anyone?) But no creature feature made up of eight-legged creepy crawlies will ever top 1990’s Arachnophobia, starring Jeff Daniels and John Goodman, and directed by Frank Marshall. It has some comedy, for sure (Goodman is hilarious as exterminator Delbert McClintock), but it’s also truly terrifying because almost every single shot includes real spiders. There is no CGI, and outside of a few scenes of Daniels battling the final boss spider, no use of animatronics. That doesn’t mean just any ol’ spider could make the movie, though. Even the arachnids had to audition.

Frank Marshall Wanted ‘Arachnophobia’ To Be Like Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’

Frank Marshall is mostly known for being a Hollywood producer. Along with Steven Spielberg and his wife, Kathleen Kennedy, Marshall founded Amblin Entertainment. He spent the ’80s producing some of the biggest films of the decade, like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, Gremlins, The Color Purple, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He’s still a producer today, but there came a point when he wanted to sit behind the camera as a director as well. You have him to thank for such movies as Alive and Congo, but in 1990, for his first film, he signed on for something called Arachnophobia.

In an interview with Amblin, Marshall spoke about working as a second unit director on Always, when Disney’s Jeffrey Katzenberg offered him a chance at being in the first chair for a movie about killer spiders. Marshall said he jumped at the chance because the script reminded him of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Hitchcock’s 1963 fright fest is about Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor‘s characters getting away for the weekend when bird attacks happen around and to them.

Marshall brought in another writer to focus on Arachnophobia‘s story. He told Amblin, “We went much more down the path of taking The Birds as our inspiration, where it was really about this family that had moved to the country from San Francisco and then this spider invasion happens all around them.”

Marshall knew that all the frightening spider attacks in the world don’t matter if you first don’t care about the characters. That made the casting of Jeff Daniels as his lead, Dr. Ross Jennings, a perfect choice. He was a serious actor known for movies like Terms of Endearment and The Purple Rose of Cairo. If anyone could sell the fear of being terrorized by hundreds of spiders, it was him. Still, Arachnophobia needed those spiders. It doesn’t matter how great of a story and acting talent you have if the antagonists end up looking silly. Arachnophobia has humor, but the spiders themselves are never a joke. For that not to happen, that meant they had to be real.

Spiders Had To Audition for ‘Arachnophobia’

These days, it’s easy to just make a creature feature with CGI spiders. That might make it less hectic for the crew, but the audience can spot that the spiders aren’t real, immediately making them a source of laughter rather than fear. Part of the reason why Infested works so well is that they actually used real spiders in scenes where the arachnids aren’t the size of a dog. Kingdom of the Spiders used real spiders, but they also raised some ethical questions, as several tarantulas were killed on screen. Thankfully, insect and arachnid guidelines now prevent this on set, which was the case with Arachnophobia. There might be scenes where a spider “dies” but no real ones were hurt.

Using real spiders definitely helps, but you still have to get the right ones. In Kingdom of the Spiders, for example, hundreds, if not thousands, of real tarantulas were used, and although they are terrifying to look at, they’re thick and slow with short legs. Frank Marshall wanted spiders that had a certain look, so he used the creepy-looking Avondale spider. They’re harmless, with no venom in their bite, but they also have long legs, huge fangs, and are very active.

Marshall told Amblin that he held “what I called the Spider Olympics,” where he had a Supervising Entomologist, Steve Kutcher, bring in the Avondale spiders for auditions. He tested them, to not only see if they looked scary, but also to look at their size, ability to climb glass, and if they could be motivated to move, which was done by aiming a hair dryer at them. Marshall said, “We had a spider condominium where we had different drawers with spiders that could climb better than others, some that were faster than others. It was really a science of different spider actors.”

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Many Tricks Were Used To Get the ‘Arachnophobia’ Spiders To Perform

The spiders in Arachnophobia don’t just walk around looking imposing, but they seem to act and hit their marks for the plot. We see them crawling inside a person’s shoe or going down a lampshade with a person sitting nearby. One scene has them coming out of a popcorn bag! So how did they do it? Part of it came from hot air from hair dryers. That’s how the scene where they seem to explode out of a bathroom sink drain happens. The spiders were in a tube with a dryer underneath them pushing them up. For the creepy popcorn bag stunt, it was all ad-libbed by the spiders, with the cameras simply recording whatever they did. In the documentary, Thrills, Chills & Spiders: The Making of Arachnophobia, Steve Kutcher said that although the spiders were easy to work with, they couldn’t be trained. He said, “You can take advantage of their behavior. If you put them in a hot place, they’ll want to come out of the hot place and go to a place that’s cooler.” In most of the scenes you see of spiders moving in a perfect direction for the scene, that’s because Kutcher or someone else is behind them with a hairdryer. Lemon Pledge was also used to get the spiders to move in certain directions. They don’t like it, so if you spray it on the floor in a line, they’ll walk away from it.

But what about Arachnophobia’s ending, where Jeff Daniels’ Dr. Ross Jennings, a man afraid of spiders, has to face off against a giant one, similar to how Chief Brody (Roy Scheider), a man afraid of water, must face the great white shark in the finale of Jaws? All sorts of stunts are done, including having the mammoth creature attack Daniels and be set on fire. No auditioning was needed for that, thankfully, as Marshall said he went to Chris Walas, who had designed the mini bad guys in Gremlins, to build an animatronic spider. He told Amblin, “I think you could say that between Steven and Kathy and I we were a bunch of grown-up kids trying to gross each other out.” It’s safe to say it worked. Arachnophobia was one of the top-grossing movies of 1990, and over three decades later, it still holds up as a realistic look into one of our greatest fears.

Arachnophobia is available to rent on Prime Video in the U.S.

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