INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE
WHEN INDIANA JONES meets a bunch of tarantulas at the start of Raiders Of The Lost Ark , he brushes them off with a bullwhip and a glare. Not a bad way to show that your hero has steel cojones. But then again, those spiders didn’t leap at his face, or climb into his shoes, or rappel down a cobweb into his hair. In the late 1980s, when Indiana Jones producer Frank Marshall was musing over what project to pick for his directorial debut and came across a script titled ‘Along Came The Spider’, about a deadly new South American arachnid arriving in a small Californian town and breeding with a regular house spider, he realised he was sitting on true nightmare fodder. So with support from producer (and wife) Kathleen Kennedy, as well as a guy named Steven Spielberg, Marshall set about making a movie — retitled Arachnophobia — that would get even Indy running for his seaplane with a shriek.
Frank Marshall (director): There’s some statistic about there being hundreds of thousands of spiders everywhere and they’re good for the environment and for keeping your house free of certain things. But I don’t think you can convince people that spiders are your friend.
Kathleen Kennedy (producer): They claim it goes back to the beginning of time; human beings sleeping around campfires. This fear is embedded in our central nervous system. Even though the majority of spiders couldn’t really hurt you, you don’t spend a lot of time trying to sort that out. There just tends to be this overarching, terrifying feeling when you see one. The only thing that freaks me out more are things that fly. Thank God spiders don’t fly.
