Cultural Depictions of Spiders - in Film and Television

In Film and Television

Spiders have been present for many decades in both film and on television, predominantly in the horror genre. Those who suffer from arachnophobia, an acute fear of spiders, become particularly horrified. The spider web is used as a motif to adorn dark passageways, depicting the recesses of the unknown. Many horror films have featured the spider, including 1955's Tarantula, exploiting America's fear of atomic radiation during the nuclear arms race, and Kingdom of the Spiders, a 1977 film starring William Shatner, depicting the consequence of hungry spiders deprived of their natural food supply due to pesticides. The fear of spiders culminates in Arachnophobia, a 1990 movie in which spiders multiply in large numbers.

On the other hand, a person who admires spiders is referred to as an "arachnophile"; such as Virginia, an orphan who likes to play spider games in the black comedy horror B-movie, Spider Baby. This cult-classic, starring Lon Chaney, Jr., spawned the hard-rock Spider Baby the Musical "for people who hate musicals.”

The 1999 film Wild Wild West features a giant mechanical spider. Experiments involving spiders tend to go horribly wrong, as with a DNA experiment on board a NASA space shuttle in the 2000 film Spiders. Radiation and spiders once again combine to wreak havoc in the 2002 film Eight Legged Freaks, this time due to nuclear waste.

Several books featuring spiders have been adapted to film, including The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King featuring Shelob and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets with Aragog the Acromantula. Charlotte's positive portrayal of a spider character can be seen in two full-length feature versions of Charlotte's Web. The first Charlotte's Web was a Hanna-Barbara musical animation released in 1973, followed by a live-action 2006 film version of the original story. Furthermore, spider characters have crawled out of the pages of comic books and onto the big screen, most notably the Spider-Man film adaptations. In Ingmar Bergman's 1961 Swedish film adaptation Through a Glass Darkly, the psychotic Karin believes she has an encounter with God as a spider. The character Kamen Rider Leangle from the 2004 Japanese TV show Kamen Rider Blade has a motif based on the onigumo spider. In the 1999 television miniseries Stephen King's It (based on his novel It), the true form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown is a large spider.

Spider themes are also featured in early film history. Fritz Lang's 1919 and 1920 The Spiders series were considered lost films, until these two parts of the action-adventure serial episodes were restored in 1978 from rediscovered original prints. In this adventure, a spider was the calling-card for "The Spiders" criminal organization. Pan Si Dong (1927), 盘丝洞, ("Cave of the Silken Web") was a film adaptation of the classic tale of Xuánzàng's encounter from a chapter of the 16th century Great Classical Novel, Journey to the West, and was remade as a 1967 Hong Kong cinema production.