‘Eight legs is too many legs!’: Why spiders have reigned supreme in horror films for 70 years

One of the first horror stories featuring spiders was published by H.G. Wells in 1903. The story was titled The Valley of Spiders and its cryptic nature has given rise to various interpretations over more than a century.

Following the Gothic literary style, Wells — the author of classics such as The Time Machine (1895) and The Invisible Man (1897) — described the pursuit by a master and his cronies of a group of fugitives, among whom was a girl longed for by the former. Suddenly, the group is surprised and attacked by enormous spiders, which move swiftly through the valley on large spheres made of their webs.

Whether the spiders are a reflection of men’s persecutory zeal, an allegory of femininity (an association as old as, at least, the Greek fable of Arachne), a curse against white colonialism — or simply spiders — is up to each reader to decide. What is clear is that the evocative power of the story and its central threat have continued to grow ever since.

Along with sharks, spiders have become creatures with their own section within the horror genre, primarily in cinema. Despite not having extensive literary precedents, the arachnid boom began in the 1950s during the Cold War — in line with nuclear panic and fear of aliens — and remained stable over the decades. The pulp imagery of the period gave rise to films such as Mesa of Lost Women (1953), in which a mad scientist creates a race of superwomen with tarantula DNA, or the more important Tarantula (1955), in which the titular creature acquires giant size through mutation.

Spiders continue to haunt the nightmares of multiplex audiences today. Last year, the Australian film Sting hit theaters, featuring an extraterrestrial arachnid adopted as a pet by a little girl that unleashes panic when it swiftly starts to grow. In 2023, Vermin: The Plague produced some of the most spectacular images in modern European horror, with subtexts about racism and inequality in France.

“There’s something horribly wrong with a creature with eight legs. Two legs we can identify with. Four legs are fine, too — who doesn’t love dogs and cats? But eight legs is too many legs!” jokes Kiah Roache-Turner, the director of Sting, speaking to EL PAÍS. “They move strangely, they can change direction too quickly, and the number of eyes is incredibly disconcerting.”

With the monster in question serving a traditional reunited family plot, Roache-Turner appears more interested in gruesome deaths and superficial suspense than in skewed interpretations.

“There’s a primal element, because for hundreds of thousands of years our brains have been taught to fear arachnids and that a bite could kill us,” she explains. ”We shy away from anything spider-like the way our hand quickly backs away from fire. It’s the kind of deep-rooted fear we horror filmmakers adore, because half our work is done before we even start writing.”

In addition to the patterns of Jaws (1975) and Alien (1979), the director cites Arachnophobia (1990), produced by Steven Spielberg, as a major influence in the field of spiders. The exterminator in Sting is inspired by the character played by John Goodman.

“I was a big fan of that movie when I was a kid,” says the director. “It was in my head because of the way it presents the threat to a family in a confined space and the horror-comedy tone.”

For Australians used to living with ominous creatures, how do you make a scary spider movie?

“Here we have some of the world’s most venomous snakes, man-eating sharks, serial killers on every corner, and a common garden spider called the funnel-web, whose bite can kill you in less than an hour," says Roache-Turner.

“Sometimes it’s as if the country itself is trying to kill you!” she continues. “It’s no wonder some of the best horror directors are from Australia. There are two types of inhabitants: those who are seriously afraid of spiders, and those who couldn’t care less. It’s easy to shock the former. In Sting, I made my spider the size of a pit bull terrier to scare the latter.”

Spiders are also fertile ground for exploring traumas and hidden fears. They have frequently been linked to the figure of the mother, due to the rigid control their webs can evoke, or the cage their eight legs appear to form. The famous large, spider-shaped sculpture in front of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, called Mama, was conceived by French artist Louise Bourgeois as a representation of the dual nature of motherhood, “protective and predatory at the same time.”

From a more general psychoanalytic perspective, they have also been symbolically associated with familial oppression and the repression that stems from it, whether sexual or otherwise. Psychological intrigues such as Enemy (2013) and Possum (2018) have moved along these lines. Arachnophobia itself played with the vulnerability of its protagonist (Jeff Daniels) and made him recreate a childhood trauma from which he finally emerged as a heroic and capable family man.

A modern fear

Marcos Méndez, from the Iberian Arachnology Group, disagrees with the notion that fear of spiders is due to an atavistic fear or an evolutionary learning curve.

“In the areas where humans evolved, there are no spiders dangerous enough to cause that atavistic fear,” he explains to EL PAÍS. ”That’s something from popular culture. I don’t know exactly where it came from, but it has no basis in reality.”

“A truly dangerous spider is one that lives in the Sydney area or black widow spiders, which have a tropical distribution in America, the Mediterranean, North Africa, and some parts of Asia,” he continues. “In the medical literature at the beginning of the 20th century, there was a fierce controversy because most people didn’t believe that spiders, such tiny creatures, could kill humans. This trend didn’t change until some particularly serious cases were proven. We’ve gone from that situation at the beginning of the 20th century to a situation where everyone is terrified of spiders, as if they were all highly poisonous and dangerous.”

A fan of science fiction films, the expert nevertheless dismisses the idea that the bulk of spider films have any redeeming features from an educational point of view.

“Eight Legged Freaks (2002) is my all-time favorite. It would be a film to put people in front of and break down their mistakes; it’s extreme. But biologically, they make very realistic spiders, even if they then ignore reality to make the plot work. You can recognize the family they’re from; there are trapdoor spiders, there are salticids, which are the ones that chase motorcycles in the desert... I’ve seen very few positive things that spider films can convey. At most, if you’re at the right age, there might be a bit of fascination. A kid might see Eight Legged Freaks, say, ‘wow, so many different spiders, doing such weird things,’ and it might get them reading.”

Méndez identifies six star themes in spider films: giant size, very fast movements, enormous leaps, group behavior or very dense colonies, unpremeditated attacks, and the presence of queen spiders and coordinated spider societies. “A spider the size of a dog, like Sting, couldn’t move because its exoskeleton couldn’t possibly support that size,” he notes of Roache-Turner’s recent release.

A plague like the one in Arachnophobia, where spiders organized like soldiers led by a general take over a town in the United States, isn’t something to be feared in practice either.

“Spiders, for the most part, are solitary, carnivorous, and predatory. They don’t tolerate competition; if there’s a very high density of spiders of the same species, they’ll usually end up attacking and eating each other,” says Méndez.

“There are very few spiders, in a couple of deserts around the world, that are subsocial and live in aggregations, usually web spiders that make a communal web that helps them capture more insects in those places where there’s so little food. Those spiders that share a megatella are usually related, a requirement for the social behavior of organisms like ants. They’re all half-sisters, at least, and never have a queen, as in Arachnophobia.”

The scientist laments the information bias that often accompanies everything related to arachnids and fosters the irrational fear that fuels fiction.

“The number of accidents they cause is ridiculous, even when we’re talking about dangerous spiders that have become more familiar to humans, such as American black widows or brown recluse spiders,” he says.

“A researcher, to demonstrate the beneficial effects of spiders, spent years studying the number of insects they ate annually, because they control pests in agricultural systems. He roughly calculated that, in one year, they could eat an amount equivalent to the weight of humanity. What did a newspaper publish? ‘If spiders coordinate, they could eat all of us humans in a year.’ These are the atrocities we have to endure. Spiders aren’t going to coordinate to attack prey they can’t eat; a human is nothing to a spider. They’re not going to create a WhatsApp group where all species, those with webs and those without, agree to eat humanity starting with the big toe!”

The lack of knowledge about spiders has, in any case, allowed them to become a well-exploited catch-all, especially in B-movies. Roache-Turner herself recognizes that the alien, mysterious, and obscure nature of arachnids favors their presentation as an absolute otherness, “a monster with which the public cannot identify.” The television film Lavalantula (2015) took this to the extreme with a humorous plot in which fire-breathing tarantulas emerged from a series of volcanic explosions in Los Angeles.

Spanish cinema has also had its share of noteworthy approaches. In Arachnid (2001), praised for its practical effects and creature designs, among the best in the genre, the venom of an eight-legged monster liquefied Pepe Sancho’s face while Neus Asensi defended herself at gunpoint. The medium-length film Mamántula (2023), nominated for a Goya Award, followed the crimes of a tarantula disguised as a human who seduced its victims to perform deadly fellatio on them. And director Ángel Gómez Hernández is currently finishing another film, also titled Arachnid, with the producers of the John Wick saga. There’s still plenty to unravel.

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