Not to be all “they don’t make ’em like they used to” — a common complaint about movies that’s somehow both self-evident and often wrong — but PG horror really does seem to be facing complete extinction. Scary movies that are genuinely frightening but also clean enough to have the whole family squealing in delighted terrorused to be a blockbuster staple, especially in the ’80s. Now, nobody is making them.
Fortunately, we still have the genre classics to revisit. One of the best is 1990’sArachnophobia, a glossy, creepy-crawly Amblin Entertainment production in the lineage ofPoltergeist,Gremlins, andThe Goonies. It’s the directorial debut of legendary producer Frank Marshall, produced by his equally legendary wife Kathleen Kennedy, and executive-produced by their Amblin co-founder Steven Spielberg. In the Spielberg-mad ’80s, the Amblin imprimatur was a license to print money, a seal of Hollywood professionalism, and also a guarantee of safely edgy family entertainment that would push the guardrails out just so far, but no further.
Arachnophobiahas all the Amblin motifs: abundant helicopter and crane shots arcing over the landscape, sweeping music, gorgeous magic-hour cinematography, amusingly weird character-actor cameos, and thrills and laughs in an aspirational, white-picket-fence suburban milieu. In the typical Amblin world, the upper-middle-class American dream of station wagons, wine cellars, and beautiful wood-frame homes is menaced by the forces of darkness, chaos, or nature, but suburbia always prevails.
Arachnophobia slots an incredibly simple premise into this framework: “Spiders are scary, right?” Boldly, though, Marshall doesn’t focus on giant mutant spiders: The eight-legged menaces in this movie remain defiantly bug-sized. A new South American species that’s so venomous it can kill instantly with a single bite is accidentally brought back to the U.S. by a research expedition led by Dr. James Atherton (Julian Sands). In a rural California town, the spider mates with a local species, creating a vast, lethal army that starts picking off the town worthies. Only arachnophobic family physician Ross Jennings (Jeff Daniels), newly arrived from San Francisco, is alert to the epidemic, but the locals are still suspicious of his Yale-educated ways. John Goodman also gives an extremely strange, mumbling comic turn as a laconic exterminator.
One of the most amazing things about watchingArachnophobia now is knowing that the spiders are real, not CGI as they would be today. The movie features an awful lot of them — 300 Avondale spiders from New Zealand, to be precise, scurrying around the set on cue and giving surprisingly compelling performances in close-up. The jeopardy comes from their supposedly lethal bites, but Marshall gets great mileage from the critters’ tiny size as they creep around the frame or drop into it on threads. There’s a frisson to the one-off kills, but Marshall saves his best tricks for a fantastically sustained, heebie-jeebies-inducing climax, as a vast army of arachnids pours into Daniels’ home through every vent and door jamb. There’s also a hilariously absurd face-off between Daniels and the OG spider in his flaming basement.
Arachnophobia is a little tricky to give a blanket recommendation to, since it’s a firm no-go for true arachnophobes, and won’t be remotely scary to spider-lovers. But for everyone else, it’s a blast: a sturdy relic of a time when scaring the hell out of little kids at the movies was a fun and socially acceptable pastime.
Where to watch:Available to stream onTubi or to rent or buy onApple,Amazon, and similar services.
Polygon’s annual Halloween Countdown is a 31-day run of short recommendations of the best horror movies, shows, TV episodes, and online specials to stream for the Halloween season. You can find the entire calendar here.
