The recent ‘Vermin: The Plague’ and ‘Sting’ They have put spiders back in the spotlight of horror cinema, but if we are talking about a classic of spider cinema par excellence we have to do it ‘Arachnophobia’. The film with Jeff Daniels and John Goodman is an icon of the 90s, surpassing ‘Kingdom of the Spiders’ from 1977, a film that used hundreds of animals, of which unfortunately, a few ended up dying. This brought into question the methods used, and while ‘Arachnophobia’ is also filmed with real spiders, and some of them had a hard time to some extent, none of them died.
This is how the spider cast of ‘Arachnophobia’ was chosen
‘Arachnophobia’ was Frank Marshall’s first film as a director, having served as producer of some great Steven Spielberg films – in fact, he is co-founder of Amblin Entertainment, Spielberg’s company – such as ‘Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark’ either ‘The color purple’. Marshall was clear that he wanted real spiders, but they had to meet certain requirements: long legs and fangs, aggressive, but at the same time, harmless to man. The species chosen was the Avondale spider.
But those requirements were not enough. Marshall organized “The Arachnid Olympics”, as he himself remembers, and for them he had an entomologist named Steve Kutcher, who supervised the process. Kutcher not only approved their appearance so that they were sufficiently terrifying, but also its size, the ability to climb the glass and its aggressiveness, using a hair dryer to activate them. “We had an apartment where there were several drawers with spiders that could climb better than others, and some were faster than others. It was really a science of spider actors.”
Sure, obviously the spiders may be better prepared, but they are not easy to direct and are not very inclined to receive instructions from the director, but they had their tricks. “You can take advantage of their behavior: if you put them in a very hot place, they will run away and get closer to a place that is cooler,” Kutcher said. In fact, The hair dryer was a very valuable tool.and in the scenes in which we see our eight-legged protagonists running in the same direction, it is probably because Kutcher was “pushing” them with the device.
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There’s only one scene where the spider isn’t real, and it’s the scariest in the movie. After the collapse in the basement, the character played by Daniels is paralyzed with the queen spider on his torso, at which point we see a terrifying close-up of the bug. Precisely this spider was an animatronic designed by Chris Walas, also designer of the “adorable” Gremlins.
