FILM · 1990 · USA
Arachnophobia
28 archived facts 3 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
28 Interesting Facts About Arachnophobia
Interesting Facts (24)
- #001
Spider safety came first throughout the shoot. For the scene where McClintock (John Goodman) sprays a spider with insecticide and then stomps it, a fake spider was sprayed, and Goodman wore special boots with hollowed-out soles so the real spider could sit safely inside until the next take.
- #002
The small spiders were Avondale spiders (Delena cancerides), a harmless species from New Zealand supplied by Landcare Research in Auckland; fierce-looking as they are, they're placid crab spiders that pose no danger to people, and quarantine rules meant they couldn't go back to New Zealand afterward. The giant "spider" was a bird-eating tarantula with a leg span of eight inches or more, a tricky animal to handle that can give a nasty bite. All the spiders were overseen and handled by renowned entomologist Steven R. Kutcher.
- #003
Jeff Daniels said he got on fine with the little spiders but admitted any sane person would have a problem with one as big as Big Bob. John Goodman was unfazed: "I don't have any problem. We look each other in the eye; well, my two eyes against their 16, but we get along just fine."
- #004
Frank Marshall wanted the film to work like Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963): "People like to be scared but laughing, like a roller coaster. Nobody wants to be terrified." To make the scares more convincing, he put the spiders in the same frame as the actors whenever he could.
- #005
Sheriff Parsons leaves the Jenningses' barn to go back to the morgue and is never seen again. Stuart Pankin has said his character was killed by a spider while driving and crashed his cruiser; the scene was shot but cut from the final film.
- #006
The crunch of John Goodman stepping on a spider was made by foley artists crushing potato chips.
- #007
Whenever dead spiders were needed, the production used ones that had died naturally.
- #008
Frank Marshall saved the big showdown between Jennings (Jeff Daniels) and the General for the very end of the shoot, after the rest of the cast had gone home. With fire, explosions and countless smashed bottles of fine wine, it took two weeks of 13-hour days. Daniels spent two of those days pinned under a 250-pound wine rack, throwing bottles at Big Bob under strict orders not to hit him, and always missing by a foot or more.
- #009
In the film, Big Bob reaches California and promptly mates with a house spider, producing super-deadly offspring. To find the right spiders for the job, Frank Marshall and his team put various species, including wolf spiders, tarantulas and huntsmen, through a "spider Olympics" of about ten tests, among them speed (faster meant scarier), climbing ability and reaction to heat and cold. The "gold medalist," according to Marshall, was the three-inch Delena spider, a harmless but bad-tempered Australian huntsman brought to New Zealand in the 1920s. "We got them all little passports," he joked, which was partly true: bringing 300 spiders into the US took a lot of red tape, and that was just the first shipment, with fresh supplies arriving every two weeks.
- #010
One of Steven Spielberg's conditions for executive producing was that John Goodman play exterminator Delbert. Spielberg had directed Goodman in Always (1989), released seven months earlier, and Frank Marshall, who directed this film, had produced Always and worked with Goodman there, so he signed off on the casting right away.
- #011
In shots where a spider is stepped on or has a book dropped on it, a foam-lined hollow was cut into the shoe or book to protect the spider, and the shots were done in separate cuts.
- #012
The production needed two kinds of spider. The first, the one that hitches a ride from South America to California, had to be about 30 cm across, and the producers found their star in an Amazonian bird-eating tarantula available in the US. Frank Marshall named it "Big Bob" after director Robert Zemeckis, and the crew painted purple stripes on its back and added a prosthetic abdomen "to give him greater bulk."
- #013
Canaima is a vengeful spirit in Guyanese Indian lore, and also the name of the area of Venezuela where the opening was shot, home to Angel Falls, the world's highest waterfall.
- #014
When the exterminator's machine sprays insecticide, it's only water; that scene and the shower scene were shot in cuts so the spiders wouldn't get too wet. When a spider goes down the drain, it's a fake drain and the spider is quickly fished out. The giant spider was mechanical, of course, as were the spiders shown being electrocuted and burned.
- #015
The original poster showed a spider dangling from a thread of web, silhouetted against the moon over the town at night. Oddly, when the artwork was used for VHS and later DVD releases, the spider was missing for years, taking away the film's key image; it was restored for the 2012 Blu-ray cover.
- #016
The white mouse supposedly injected with spider venom and dying on camera was never actually injected; the needle was retractable.
- #017
An urban legend claimed singer Brandy Norwood had a small part in the film, but it's been debunked: the "Brandy" credited as "Brandy Beechwood" is the Beechwoods' Golden Retriever, and she never appears on screen.
- #018
The actors could act with their faces, but to show a spider's "emotions" the filmmakers had to rely on its natural movements and posture, along with camera angles to make the spiders look scarier.
- #019
Steven Spielberg had planned for the second Roger Rabbit short, Roller Coaster Rabbit, to run before this film, but Michael Eisner chose to premiere it with Dick Tracy instead. Spielberg was reportedly unhappy, and it would be years before the third and last Roger Rabbit short was made.
- #020
A fake spider was used for the shot of a raven flying off with a spider in its beak, and when the raven falls from the sky, the shot cuts to a fake raven; the dead raven on the ground is fake too.
- #021
When the spider hiding in the football player's helmet bites him and he dies on the field, the sound at the moment of the bite, over his pained expression, isn't a sound effect but a sample from the British industrial group Coil: the opening tone of "Unquiet Rest," one of the pieces they recorded as a rejected original score for Hellraiser (1987), later released on their 1995 compilation Unnatural History II.
- #022
Some spiders really do live in colonies, but none are male-led or have a single "queen" like ants or bees. The reason arthropods and other exoskeletoned creatures aren't house-sized is that they'd collapse under their own weight. The opening scene, where scientists use a knockout gas to collect specimens, would have left many spiders missing legs: a tarantula dropped from more than two meters bursts apart, and these spiders fall 30 meters from a tree, which none would really survive. Insects and other bugs also take in oxygen through openings in their bodies, and only the ancient atmosphere had enough oxygen for giant insects. The General is the size of a goliath bird-eater, one of the biggest known tarantulas, beaten only by the giant huntsman in leg span; a quick image search shows the differences.
- #023
The opening was shot at Angel Falls in CANAIMA National Park, Estado Bolívar, Venezuela, which clearly inspired the name of the fictional town of CANAIMA, California, where the rest of the film takes place.
- #024
When Prof. Atherton (Julian Sands) asks where the photo of a spider web in Dr. Jennings's waiting room was taken, Sheriff Parsons (Stuart Pankin) says the place Dr. Jennings bought is "old Daniels's place"; Jennings is played by Jeff Daniels.
Behind the Scenes (2)
- #025
The animatronic General spider in the climax was one of the first props built by Jamie Hyneman, later star and co-host of MythBusters (2003).
- #026
For The General, a 15-inch mechanical stunt double for Big Bob, the production went to a Hollywood prop shop, where it was built by none other than future MythBuster Jamie Hyneman.
Characters & Cast (2)
- #027
When Jeff Daniels signed on as Dr. Ross Jennings, it was a straight horror film, and he found the script formulaic, telling Philadelphia's "Daily News," "You could kind of tell the lines were written by a computer." He and Frank Marshall wanted a more tongue-in-cheek tone, so the script went through several rewrites and the producers studied Alfred Hitchcock's films and Jaws (1975) to get it right. One key change: Daniels's character was given a fear of spiders.
- #028
Frank Marshall wanted an all-star cast, but when Disney gave the film a modest $22 million, cheaper actors had to be cast to leave money for the effects. John Goodman, then the cast's biggest name thanks to Roseanne (1988), took a pay cut as a favor to executive producer Steven Spielberg, who had directed him in Always (1989). Other roles still had to go to less expensive actors, including the lead, Ross Jennings, played by Jeff Daniels, then known mainly as a character actor and occasional indie lead; this film helped establish him as a leading man, but his big success as a lead didn't come until Dumb and Dumber (1994), four years later.
Sources & editorial notes
Reference databases
- IMDb
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