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Horror comedy film
- Arachnophobia is a 1990 American horror comedy film directed by Frank Marshall in his directorial debut from a screenplay by Don Jakoby and Wesley Strick.
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Arachnophobia is a 1990 American horror comedy film directed by Frank Marshall in his directorial debut from a screenplay by Don Jakoby and Wesley Strick.
Dark Comedy Comedy Horror Thriller. A new species of South American killer spider hitches a lift to a California town in a coffin and starts to breed, leaving a trail of deaths that puzzle and terrify young Dr. Ross Jennings, who is newly arrived in town with his family. Director. Frank Marshall. Writers. Don Jakoby.
- (77K)
- Comedy, Horror, Thriller
- Frank Marshall
- 1990-07-18
- It Was A Long-Time Spielberg Collaborator’S Directorial Debut.
- The Original Script Was More Horror, Less Comedy.
- One Spider Used on The Production Was Named For A Hollywood Director.
- The Spider Had to Be Made Scarier For The Movie.
- John Goodman Wasn’T Freaked Out by The Spiders.
- A Household Cleaning Agent Played A Part in Wrangling The Spiders.
- Marshall Planned His Shots Very Carefully.
- The Actors Had to Be patient.
- The Crew Had A “Spider Lotto.”
- Filming The Scene Where A Spider Gets Stepped on Took hours.
Frank Marshall had produced a number of films for Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, including The Goonies, Poltergeist, Gremlins, Empire of the Sun, and The Color Purple (among many others). He had directed second unit photography and some short films—including making-of documentaries for the Indiana Jones movies, which he also produced—but ...
When Jeff Daniels came on board to play Dr. Ross Jennings, Arachnophobia was a serious horror movie—one that Daniels told Philadelphia’s Daily News was pretty formulaic. "You could tell that the lines were kind of written by computer," he said. He and Marshall were hoping for a black comedy with a more ironic tone, so the script went through severa...
The production required two species of spider: The first—the arachnid that hitches a ride from South America to California—needed to measure about one foot across. The filmmakers found their star in a bird-eating tarantula native to the Amazon; there was only one such spiderin the U.S. Marshall named the spider Big Bob after director Robert Zemecki...
As terrifying as Big Bob was, he still wasn't scary enough for Arachnophobia. So the production painted purple stripes on his back and added a prosthetic abdomen “to give him greater bulk,” according to Entertainment Weekly.
Though Daniels claimed that he was fine withsmall spiders, he acknowledged that “anyone in his right mind” would have issues with spiders as huge as Big Bob. But John Goodman, who played exterminator Delbert McClintock, wasn’t fazed. “I don’t have any problem,” he said. “We see each other eye to eye—well, two eyes to their 16—but we get along swell...
“You can’t actually teach them to do anything,” wrangler Steven Kutcher told Entertainment Weekly. “You just watch what they do, then figure out how you can apply it to what you want them to do.” Still, he managed to come up with some solutions for controlling them: He discovered that the spiders hated Lemon Pledge—it gummed up their feet—and used ...
“One of the things I learned in my second unit directing days is the only way it’s going to be scary is to include the spiders in the same shots with the actors,” he said. “So we’ve been designing the shots so when you start on a person you pan over, there’s a spider there, and the audience will know the spiders are very, very close to all the acto...
“This film takes a special kind of actor,” Daniels joked to The New York Times. “You have to realize from day one of shooting that the spiders come first. They're picked up first in the morning, they're first in the chair at makeup, they take lunch first. And they've also got the biggest trailer.'' The spiders didn’t always do what they were suppos...
The New York Times reported that one of the most often heard phrases on the set of Arachnophobia was “Spiders, take 10.” Marshall told the paper that sometimes the cast and crew had "a spider lotto; everyone puts $5 on the take they think is going to work. Twenty-one takes is the longest we've gone.”
The safety of the spiders was paramount throughout the entire production, so for one scene where Goodman had to spray an arachnid with insecticide, then squash it with his boot, the production went to extreme measures: First, a dummy spider was sprayed. Then Goodman donned special boots with a hollowed out sole for the squash shot. “[The spider] wo...
- Jeff Daniels, as small town doctor Ross Jennings, received top billing for the film. Even so, he doesn’t appear in the movie until 20 minutes in.
- John Goodman has Stephen Spielberg to thank for his role in Arachnophobia. In order to executive produce the film, Spielberg had a stipulation that Goodman have a role because he loved working with him on Always (1989).
- This was Frank Marshall’s directorial debut. He went on to direct other films including Alive (1993) and Congo (1995).
- MythBusters alum Jamie Hyneman worked on the film as a special effects technician and created the animatronic spider general for the final scenes of the film.
Oct 11, 2020 · 30 years later, Arachnophobia remains a true one-off. A film equal parts horror and comedy and one that would fall flat if either side hadn’t been up to muster.
Jul 18, 1990 · Compared with such loathsome horrors, “Arachnophobia” is a relatively benign thriller, in which spiders kill a few people and scare a lot more, but never get really disgusting the way cockroaches would.
A strange spider from the depths of a jungle is accidentally transported back to the good old USA. Through numerous coincidences and accidents, it finds a home in the barn of a doctor's new home. After it mates with a local spider, thousands of little spiders run riot in the small town.
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