Trending that caught Doug’s eye… scary big-screen spiders

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/09/2015 (3665 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As we fear-mongering journalists like to say, this story has legs — eight of them, to be precise.

According to a host of creepy-crawly online reports, Britain is facing an invasion of venomous false widow spiders. It seems warm weather throughout the summer led to a population boom, and Britain’s most venomous spider is expected to head indoors in coming weeks as the temperatures drop.

Pest management expert Clive Boase told the Daily Mail newspaper Britain’s population of false widows has boomed in recent years.

“They are generally shy creatures and won’t come out into the open, but they could crawl into curtains or perhaps clothing left on the floor,” Boase said.

While reports of bites are relatively rare, reactions to the spider’s venom can be severe.

In a similar alarming vein, Matthew Field became a YouTube sensation after uploading a video of Britain’s biggest spider prowling around his garden in Kent.

“It startled me — it wasn’t happy that I had disturbed it and it definitely eats spiders as prey,” Field said of the video of him using a stick to prompt the tube web spider, which grows to about 12 centimetres in diameter, to move.

Which makes this the perfect time for arachnophobes to wring their hands and sweat profusely as they nervously check out our list of the Top 5 Scariest Movie Spiders:

5) The scary spider: The 100-foot-tall tarantula from Tarantula (1955)

The creature feature: What we are talking about here is one of the first giant mutant monsters to stomp across movie screens in the 1950s. The truth is, movies like this are pretty darn campy, but when you grew up in the era before state-of-the-art computer graphics, this was the sort of fright flick you watched with your hands shielding your sweaty little face. It had the standard plot line of the day: Some kind of atomic research goes horribly wrong causing standard-size creatures to mutate to the size of recreational vehicles with a taste for human flesh. “It came out one year after Japan struck freakin’ gold with Godzilla, and some American genius said, ‘We’re all afraid of spiders! Let’s make one big one!’ ” chirped Listverse.com. “It didn’t really work, though, because the poor dumb monstrosity couldn’t skitter-skitter-skitter down the streets like a real spider would.” Still, it scared the dickens out of this pint-sized columnist back in the day. The movie, which got a 92 per cent rating from the review website Rotten Tomatoes, opens when a man with a strangely misshapen face wanders out of the Arizona desert near a small town and drops dead. It turns out he was an assistant to a professor who had been experimenting with growth hormones to come up with a way to increase the world’s food supply. Of course, they tested it on a tarantula that — brace yourselves for a huge surprise — escapes and terrorizes the town, munching its way through random cattle and stray human beings. Machine guns won’t kill it. Dynamite won’t kill it. Regular bombs won’t kill it. The real highlight — a very young Clint Eastwood as a jet fighter pilot who napalms the creature into oblivion. It really made his day.

4) The scary spider: The giant spider from The Giant Spider Invasion (1975)

The creature feature: This ultra-low-budget 1975 film is a hilariously cheesy throwback to the giant-monster movie craze of the 1950s. The plot is not important, but here’s how it’s described by the website of Mystery Science Theater 3000, which provides alternative soundtracks to cheesy movies: “Some sort of meteor shoots out of the Crab Nebula and makes its way to Earth, where it lands in the back pasture of a family of hillbillies. A giant spider emerges and starts laying rock-like eggs all over the place from which hatch a bunch of creepy tarantulas. Now it’s up to a NASA scientist and an astrophysicist to figure out a way to destroy the monster before it and its children manage to ravage the whole countryside. There’s hillbillies, bumpkin sheriffs, a teenage reporter, and a whole town full of drunken lumberjacks facing off against The Giant Spider Invasion. Who will win the final battle?” Well, it doesn’t really matter, but the heroes use a “neutron device” to melt the spiders into a large puddle of goo. What’s important is this below-B-grade movie starred a bunch of has-beens like Alan Hale Jr. (famed for playing the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island). He actually says “Hey, little buddy” during the film. Best of all, the film’s “giant spider” is, in fact, a Volkswagen Beetle covered with artificial black fur, with fake legs operated from inside the car by seven members of the crew.

3) The scary spider: Aragog the Acromantula from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

The creature feature: Like more than a few of us, Harry Potter’s buddy, Ron Weasley, wasn’t a fan of spiders, which is why he was so terrified when they came face to fang with Aragog, the car-sized giant spider in the 2002 flick Chamber of Secrets, the second in the fantasy franchise. In a nutshell, Aragog started life the size of a small dog and ended it the size of an elephant with an 18-foot leg span. He was raised by Hagrid the gamekeeper at Hogwarts and was framed as the “monster” Hagrid was accused of releasing from the mysterious chamber in the bowels of the school. When they dragged Hagrid off to Azkaban prison, he whispered to Harry and Ron to “follow the spiders,” which they did, which is how they ended up meeting the elderly, blind Aragog and his children in the dank depths of the Forbidden Forest. The boys learn Aragog was not the monster terrorizing the school and Hagrid was innocent. So far, so good, but things get icky when it’s time to leave the forest. Chirps Harry: “Well… thank you. We’ll just go.” Snorts Aragog: “Go? I think not. My sons and daughters do not harm Hagrid on my command, but I cannot deny them fresh meat when it wanders so willingly into our midst. Goodbye, friend of Hagrid.” Squeaks Ron: “Can we panic now?” Just as we spider-haters are about to freak out and hide our heads in our popcorn buckets, our plucky heroes are rescued by the sudden arrival of the Weasley family’s flying car. We personally would have turned our wand into the world’s largest rolled-up newspaper.

2) The scary spider: Shelob from The Lord of the Rings

The creature feature: Forget Sauron, kids; the creepiest villain in The Lord of the Rings wasn’t the ultimate evil wizard, it was Shelob, the giant spider that tried to chow down on Hobbit buddies Frodo and Sam in 2003’s The Return of the King, the final installment of the film trilogy. The big, bad spider was onscreen for less than 10 minutes, but it took something like 3,000 computers and a devoted team of special-effects wizards to bring the big bug to life. The movies’ visual-effects boss, Jim Rygiel, told Entertainment Weekly the first models of Shelob were built in 1998, but tons of changes were made as technology developed. It turns out the monster was modelled after New Zealand’s tunnelweb spider, which gave director Peter Jackson the shivers. In the movie, Gollum tricks Frodo and his friend Sam into entering Shelob’s lair, a terrifying battle ensues, in which Frodo is paralyzed by venom and Sam, wielding his master’s elvish sword, Sting, hacks away at the spider. In the end, Shelob heaves up over Sam to crush him, but instead impales herself on Sting. Grievously wounded, Shelob scuttles away, never to be seen again. “The whole sequence involving Shelob… is some of the best parts of that movie,” gushes fan website viewsfromthesofa.com. “She is huge, relentless and very scary looking. You want to embody evil, a spider beats a giant flaming eye every time.”

1) The scary spider: Tarantula from Dr. No

The creature feature: When it comes to being terrified, you can keep your movie magic, because nothing beats the real thing. In 1962’s Dr. No, the historic first film in the James Bond franchise, 007 is shipped off to Jamaica on a mission to investigate the murder of a fellow operative that seems to have some connection to a series of failures in the U.S. space program. Naturally, the trail leads him to the secret underground base of evil genius Dr. No and his dastardly radio beam weapon. What gave us the chilly willies was when Dr. No ordered an underling to dispatch Bond by the tried and true method of dropping a tarantula into his hotel room. In reality, a tarantula bite is no worse than a bee sting. In Bond’s world, well, it’s a bit more lethal. So there’s Bond snoozing when, suddenly, a tarantula is creeping along under the covers. We movie buffs can see Bond is (bad word) sweating bullets while the bug is bonding with him. When the spider finally wanders off his body, Bond bolts out of bed and beats it to death with his shoe. Fortunately, he is licensed to kill — spiders. This scene is on a lot of online lists of scary movie spiders. Notes the Internet Movie Database website: “(Actor) Sean Connery is morbidly afraid of spiders. The shot of the spider in his bed was originally done with a sheet of glass between him and the spider, but when this didn’t look realistic enough, the scene was re-shot with stuntman Bob Simmons. Simmons reported that the tarantula crawling over Bond was the scariest stunt he had ever performed.” The spider was named Rosie, by the way.

We suspect some of you brave souls would have put the spider-intensive movies Arachnophobia and Eight Legged Freaks on this list, but that’s not the bug-eyed point. The point is… WHAT’S THAT CRAWLING ON OUR KEYBOARD… OHMYGAWD, SOMEONE HAND US A NEWSPAPER!”

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca