‘The history of medicine is the history of the unusual…’
I am, by equal measure, terrified and fascinated by spiders (read more about that here). And so, it always surprises me how few spider based horror movies there are out there. It also makes me suspicious. Are our spider overlords supressing spider-based horror in order to enhance their reputation amongst the human community? I wouldn’t put it past them. Anyway, Tarantula, released in 1955, features an actual tarantula and so is horrifying despite also being very silly…
Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll) uses his hard earned scientific intuition to take creatures and make them massive. In his vast laboratory, he keeps a menagerie of massive rats, massive hamsters, and one massive tarantula. I never really caught the reason why he has all these massive things which is either because the plot doesn’t explain it properly or that I’d drank a full bottle of mulled wine before watching. Regardless, the big lad only bloody escapes and then the rest of the film follows the attempts of Dr. Matt Hastings (John Agar) to deal with this outsized arachnid.
Both director Jack Arnold and cinematographer George Robinson were veterans of Universal monster movies by 1955, having worked on Creature from the Black Lagoon and Dracula respectively, and so, despite this being a film about a giant radioactive spider, everything looks gorgeous. Shot on location in Apple Valley, California, Tarantula makes full use of its wondrous desert setting, and everything is bathed in natural light and surrounded by rolling sand dunes. The narrative is all nonsense, of course, but the spider attacks, when they finally occur, are genuinely unnerving. A CGI spider will never be able to match the horror of seeing an actual spider up on the big screen, and sure enough, I have spent every waking moment since watching this film checking the corners of every room I walk into. So, I suppose, in that respect, the film must be considered a success.
Tarantula is a relic of a time in which a horror film could be as simple as ‘there is a massive spider’. No elevated horror here. The spider isn’t a metaphor for grief. It’s just a big awful spider. Simpler times.
