My Top 25 Halloween Favorites: Spiders

Here's modern day B-movie that's pretty stupid. And yeah, I know that B-movies are supposed to be stupid, but in order to be a good B-movie, they're also to have a certain level of charm. What made so many of the B-movies of the 50s, 60's and 70s so much fun to watch was the creative way the makers of those movies got around the limited tech that was the basis of the special effects. By the beginning of the new millenium, special effects had risen to the level of sophisticated CGI, which now could make anything, including mostrous creature, come to life on the silver screen. Eight-Legged freaks, altho an honest effort, never took this into account. And therefore, despite it's intention of being a B-movie, seem to slack off too much on it's script and humor to provide the kinda charm that makes over-the-top creature features of this type enjoyable.
Still, as I said, it's origin as an honest effort to the genre and the fact that it's presence in the film world does help keept the long standing tradition of movies under the category of "B" alive, I put it on this list. Plus, how can any list about spider-themed films not include some "freak" on it?

Okay, so I knew instantly that when I had decided to put together a list of Halloween favorites that would feature my fave spider-themed horror moments, that I was gonna have to include at least one or two B-movies, despite the fact that I'm not really all that into that kind of low-brow cinema (with the exception of the kaiju films from Toho studios...I find the charm of their rubbery-feet mayhem too hard too resist). And while the list of crawling critters camp for the arachnid is pretty extensive (The Spider, The Tarantula, Kindom Of The Spiders, or even the more modern Eight-Legged Freaks), I finally ended up settling for a not so well known B-flick from South America (a continent that knows something about real life spider horrors).



This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse is the second chapter in the trilogy about a character named Coffin Joe. He is a caretaker with a taste for murder and on a quest to find the "perfect woman" to help him sire what he deems as immortal prodigy. Kidnapping a group of females and putting them through a series of "fear" tests, he hopes that it will filter out the ideal woman of his dreams. And of course, in keeping with the theme of this list, one of these tests includes filling a room where the potential future mamas are sleeping with tarantulas.
Which sets up an interesting story for the day when the son asks his father exactly just how daddy met mommy.

Peur(s) Du Noir (which, I'm sure most of you reading this are smart enough to decipher that it translates into the English title that you see immediately above in the title bar) is a French black and white anthology film that features a series of animated shorts all based on the kinds of semi-surrealistic images that you would usually see in dreams.



Each story is drawn in the style of a different independent comicbook artist and they all pretty much manage to convey the kind of creepy uncomfortableness that will make any sleeper dreaming these dreams to squirm spasmodically in their bed. And while none of these vagarious vignettes actually center completely on the species of crawling critter known as aranea, there are still enough eight-legged images of the web-weaving arachnid skittering throughout to help fill out this list quite fittingly.

Obviously, this first installment in the massively huge franchise of Dr. Jones is much more known as being a blockbusting summertime adventure than anything else. But you don't get to the top level of thrills that Raiders Of The Ark has done without a few chills thrown in.
Now when it comes to those "Yikes!" moments in Raiders, while most people tend to spotlight on the slithery scene that puts to the test the pacemakers of the those viewers who suffer from ophidiophobia (look it up), there is a spidery moment near the beginning of this film that caused any arachnophobia ailing members in the audience to jump in their seats.

First of all let me say, that in my opinion, The Croods, despite its above average popularity, is the second most underrated CGI animated film franchise out there today (The How to Train Your Dragon series comes in as the first). With that out of the way, this second chapter in the lives of the first family of prehistoric history, features a rather randam amalgam that sort of fits into the theme of this list.
It's a wolf-spider, which literally is just an obvious merging of the two variably non-compatatble animal species.
Okay, so because this film is a result of DreamWorks Animation, one of the titans of family friendly GCI fare currently making movies, maybe this wolf-spider (which ironically enough is called a "Wolf-Spider") isn't really the stuff of which nightmares of spun of. 'Ey, but at least we can say that it's almost scary how the merging of these two such differnt animals (which, in their orignal separated forms can be pretty frightening on their own) can produce an end-result that can e be so downright cute.
No...?
Okay then, let's just move on....

I'm not usually a fan of campy gore-fest films, particularly those that infamously came out of the country of Italy during the late seventies and early eighties. However, this was one that I watched with my high school buddies back in the day, and even though at the time I wasn't all that impressed the not-so-linear story, I did notice that some of the scary bits did tend to linger in my psyche for several days after I viewed the film. Unlike other uber-graphic horror films of this kind, I think a part of the reason for this is that the director/writer did try set up the fear-laden situations in The Beyond with a thematic purpose other than to just gross out the audience. He had a vision as to what some of the events were supposed to be symbolizing other than just tryin' to make the audience "Oh, gross...!!". Which I think helps in adding an actual sense of fear on top of the base emotion of simple disgust that tend to drive this particular movie sub-genre. There is a part in this tale 'o' terror which depicts a human face being devoured by a band of hungry, flesh eating eight-leggers which was one the first scenes to come to mind when I first came up with the idea of doing this list.

How do you balance out the over-running flow of testosterone in a group of male-dominated superheroes that includes the multi-ton muscled Hulk? Throw in a female heroine whose abilities of kickeassery include the power to seduce men's thoughts into revealing whatever secrets she needs to know in order to get the job done. And such a power requires the package to match. Something that S.H.I.E.L.D. super-agent, the Black Widow sports in spades. With her healthy sized boobage, perfect ass and gorgeous face, it's pretty damn scary how bodaciously and beaut-fully her body can fill out that costume.



Okay, okay, for any of you "list purists" who think that these lists should stay strictly within the boundaries of their themes and this entry strays too far from the idea of creepy spider moments in movies,
well then,
replace this entry with Kingdom of the Spiders. It's a bug themed B-movie with a whole kingdomful of spiders that should be big enough to satisfy your appetite for "coloring within the lines" tastes.
...ya bunch of nit-picky, no-fun tight-wads.....

And while we're on the subject of the Marvel Universe....



Years ago, when Marvel Comics first decided to change one of their flagship character's, Spider-Man, iconic red and blue costume for the first time, it was considered quite a groundbreaking event in the comic book world of publishing. However, the move proved to be much more popular than expected, that the costume ended up developing a life of it's own. Literally.
And in the end, became a much darker (and we don't mean just in it's color) version of a webslinging wonder than the one who had developed a reputation of being from a friendly neighborhood.

Obviously, as the title indicates, this is the kaiju flick which features the introduction of Godzilla's kid, Minilla.
But more importantly, for the purposes of this list, this also sports the dangly debut has Kumonga, the anthropodic answer to the Toho Company's menagerie of towering terrors. This behemoth-sized spider beast, also known as Spiega, although not as iconic as others in 'Zilla's vicious circle, still has been able to make a mark for itself in the field of rubbery limbed monolithic miscreations that dwell on Monster Island.

Now obviously, we all realize that no one can pull off be a movie called The Fly without featuring a spider somewhere along the way.
Although, now that I think about, I guess that that's exactly what the 1986 Jeff Goldblum version tried to do. Which is why this 1958 b-movie classic has the prestige of being on this list while the later one does not.
Because with it's ending of a half human, gnat-sized and helplessly web-entangled "spider-man" squeakily crying out "Help me, help me!" as a abundantly-sized-even-by-normal-standards arachnid slowly skitters in for dinner, it is a scene that satisfies the kind of appetite of which this list was woven for (man, I'm chompin' away through these spidery themed puns faster than a Black Widow does through it's mates....)

Sometimes, making ends meet can require that a person take desperate measures. On the female side of the spectrum, it is not surprising that these desperate measures may mean that she compromise her beauty, body and the boundaries of her integrity, just to pay the rent for that month.
Most Beautiful Island is one such story. An independent and slightly artful film, it tells the tale of Luciana, an immigrant from Spain living in New York. Her status as an illegal alien however, limits her ability to take advantage of living in the land of opportunity, and therefore, restricting her manners of employmet to menial jobs such as a babysitter and a sign-spinner. When a fellow illegal gives her a vague lead to a job that could make her a lot of money in a short amount of time, she begins to suspect that it is one that requires her to sacrifice the honor of her "most beautiful island". And while it is true that she must make such a sacrifice, it is not in the manner suspects. Instead, it turns out to be a strange and macabre method of upper class maschoism that centers on the subject theme of this particular list.

If there's one thing that can strike fear into the very core of any man, it's the idea that a part of his body is shrinking. The only thing worse would be that every part of his body is shrinking.
And the only thing worse than that would be that every part of his shrunken body was on the menu of a house spider in the basement that he had to run down to in order to hide from the cat after it made the attempt at making him its din-din.
It's a pretty common fear amongst men, actually.
I think that's why they made it into a movie. It's a fear we all can relate too.

James is a kid who lives next to a giant peach. When he enters it, he becomes a stop-motion cartoon character and befriends a group of talking insects which includes Miss Spider. A french beret-wearing mademoiselle, she's one of Jame's peach pit posse and therefore one of the "good guys". We're supposed to like her, but with multi-orbbed irises, a fanged smile and a prison-stripe thorax and abdomen, despite her friendly nature, Miss Spider's visual characteristics come together to give her a certain type of shuddersome je ne sais quoi that you would never want to see crawling out of any kind of produce, giant or otherwise.

The period of time between the late 1930's until the end of the 1940's covered alot of ground when it came to creating classic creatures and subgenres in the field of horror movies. Iconic standouts like Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, the wolfman, along with general concepts like mummies, mad scientists and zombies crawled out into existence and became longstanding standards of the genre. But when the Iron Curtain of the Cold War came slamming down in the 50's, it not only crushed the trust of international powers in the political world, but also it squelched many of the vampires, werewolves and undead themes of the world of cinema. The rise of the Atomic Age gave rise to the b-movie beast-themed behemoths, in which several species in the animal kingdom grew to horrific heights due to the effects of radiation. And one such "victim" was the tarantula! Already the biggest of the arachnids, in this physics-defying film, one of these hairy eight-legged crawlers ends up evolving to a size bigger than just about any other species of living organism on the planet. So big to the point where it needs an exclamation point at the end of it's name!

After discovering a mysterious door in the new family home, Coraline, a curious kid by nature, soon finds herself inside a parallel dimension and knee-deep in kinship with an enigmatic "mom" who wants to replace the "old" one. At first, this alternative mommy's only distinguishing trait is that she has a couple of buttons for eyes. But when she starts to get cross with Coraline's rejection of her matriarchal affections, her appearance starts to take on the spidery semblance that reveals her true web-weaving motives.
A really cool and creepy kids film that shows what can happen when children disappoint their Other Mother.

In The Chamber Of Secrets, the second chapter of the insanely popular Harry Potter series, we are introduced to Aragog, a mythical creature of the wizarding world known as an acromantula. Which is basically a big, giant talking hairy spider from hell (well, not hell exactly, more like the Forbidden Forest.... which, when you think about it, is probably close enough, I guess......).



At the size of a truck and surrounded by a vast colony of his carnivous "children", it's defintely not the kind of creature you would like to run into in the middle of the woods at night. Or on the street in the middle of the day for that matter.

In Greentown Il, a carnival has come to town. And as the title of this movie implies, it has brought something wicked to the inhabitants of this small mid-western community. Will and Jim are two local boys who come to discover that part of that "something evil" includes an army of hairy tarantulas trying their best to replace the carpeting and wallpaper in their bedroom.

Yo, you wanna make a modern, low-budget, b-movie about a big ass spider? Then take a look this flick. And don't just look at it, study it. Every eight legged part of it. Because, in the beginning, the whole beauty of those rarified b-movies that have since earned the status of classics or cult films is that, despite their small budgets and other limited resources, somehow they were able to rise above the restrictions of their paltry production pennies and still create a magic of guiltless entertainment that is the center of many cheapskate cinophiles' tastes. Not since 1955's "Tarantula!" has a film been able to stretch out it's meager means to create a web-weaving wonder of whale-sized wallcrawlers.

So when movie makers worked out a deal between the studios that owned the rights to Godzilla and King Kong, they decided to merge the two kings of monsters into one universe called the MonsterVerse. Of course, the obvious objective was to get them to eventully fight each other as Toho Studios did back in the early 60s.
However, after said climtic battle occurs (which of course, it did in 2021's aptly named blockbusting epic Godzilla Vs. Kong), this new MonsterVerse was gonna need other ideas to fill in the running times of future franchise flicks.
Therefore, Skull: Island has intiated such steps by showing that this alternate world of kaiju is full of all sorts of big beasties, many eminating from Skull Island (which I'm assuming will be that world's version of Monster Island, from the earlier generation of floppy feeted films). And while one of the creature showcased could very well likely some kind of arachne type of species, itremains to be seen if it will be in any relation the big bamboo spindly legged spider from this movie.

In this second chapter of the Hobbit movie franchise, the central big-footed protagonist, Bilbo Baggins, causes what would eventually lead to the desolation of Smaug.
And while that sounds more like a job for the Department Of Air Quality Control in the city of Los Angeles, in the world of Middle-Earth, it's actually the manner in which a lord of the ring goes about slaying a dragon.
In this "early" installment of the Tolkien epic fantasy, series, Peter Jackson and his crew continue the very complicated journey of "bringing home the gold" and joining the fight of the "Five Armies", juggling Hobbits, wizards, orcs, elves, wargs and a buncha other eldritch life-forms, along the way. Including, a couple of giant spiders, who's "soul" purpose is to weave our heroes into an already entangled web of adventure, war and "desolation".

Once again, science fiction meets horror in this tale of other-worldly bug-eyed beasties and beastly bugs entering our world via a mysterious mist that, as the lead characters soon find out, is probably not the result of any natural weather pattern known on this planet.
One of the insectoid species from this animal kingdom of an alternative reality are a group of arachne big enough to comfortably fit inside a doghouse and who weld dangerous skull-like smiles and even more dangerous flesh-burning acidic web.
But should any hapless human ever find themselves surviving being entangled withing their woven webbing, they need not worry. These aren't the kind of monster spiders that eat you. They'll just lay their spawn-laden egg inside your gut which will play host to hundreds of their lil' offspring until they come exploding out to join the rest of the inter-dimensional invasion.

You wanna see how far we've come when it comes to freaky spider movies? Here's one of the freakiest, (freaky in terms of creepy, that is) and it's called, of all things, "Possum".
But make no mistake, despite the mammalian rodent themed title, the fright of this film is fueled by a very spider-like creature that, even though it's more of the result of a puppeteer's handiwork, has the kind of creepy-crawly eight spindly legs that will climb into the back of your deepest nightmares, and spin a web of induring terror that will haunt you long after you stopped streaming .

To be honest, had Shelob been the main protagonist of the the final installment of Peter Jackson's big budget film adaptation of The Lord Of the Rings, this limb lumbering embodiment of evil would probably have been on the number one spot of this list.



Out of all the movies so far that have tried to portray the species of arachne in a frightful fashion, none have been as successful as the digital depiction featured in The Return Of The King.
Just as every other aspect in the filming of Tolkien's fantasy epic, great care and detail went into creating a crawly critter of whose immense size was dwarfed only by the realism of it's skittering movements and by the darkness of its nature. An eight-legged freak that was sophisticatedly computer generated to look like the kind of monster which weaves the life debilitating fears and nightmares that all arachnophobes worldwide dream and scream about.

The thing that makes this movie so scary is that it's a movie about a scary thing.



Which is basically just what this plot entails.
Some kind of alien thing is going around and merging with whatever lifeform it can get it's tentacle(s) on,
& then, once in it's clutches, that lifeform is also transformed it into this... uhh... well, y'know...thing.
And even though the shapelessness of this thing makes it a pretty difficult thing to describe at a more specific level, there is a point where it does morph itself into a kind of walking spider thing with a somewhat human head.
Which is an image that, as most sci-fi nerds know by now, has become classically iconic when referring to this movie. It's also considered one of the creepiest parts of the film and therefore more than qualifies The Thing as the type of boogey-man buggery worthy of a pretty high level entry on this list.

Of course, it is only fitting that the number one spot of cinematic spider moments worthy of instilling arachnophobia belongs to a movie entitled Arachnophobia. And while it may initially come off as an over-obvious answer for the top spot, the truth is, this is the one film of its kind so far whose primary objective is to depict the kind of willies that can come from suffering from an intense fear of multi-eyed, eight-legged, web-weavers. Other film efforts have been too bogged down by either their lack of funding, their level of crappy B-movie quality or just by their lack of trying (Eight-legged Freaks) at trying to make the idea of the spider something that makes even the most manliest of men scream like little girls. And even though John Goodman's role does add a bit of camp to the film, it doesn't come anywhere near the point where it makes the audience forget that this is a flick about a phobia.



Not that there's still plenty of room for making a solid arachnid horror flick. I still eagerly await the coming of that one movie whose main star will be a giant tarantula that is realistically animated to the level of Shelob from Return Of The King. Or that one movie that will be able to nightmarishly depict a swarm of spiders attacking the human populace with sacrificing the legitimacy of the story.
But until then, this is the best effort that I've come across so far to mix in the kinds of elements that leans more towards the horror of the horror film genre.



So, if at the end of all of this, if you still feel that there's a lack of the kind of fear factor that should come from the species of arachne during the Halloween season, then here's a far out fact that might help to compensate (a little, at least):
Statistics show that the average human will, in their lifetime, eat about 8 spiders while asleep.
And no matter how loosely you may define "average human",
that does include you.
Sleep well tonight, everyone.