Sunday, July 6, 2025

The spiders will never again be real

On Saturday night, in the second installment of our unofficial "spider movie series" -- the first of which I mentioned in Friday's post -- my wife and I watched a 1990s favorite of mine that I hadn't seen since the 1990s, Frank Marshall's Arachnophobia.

As a side note before we get to the crux of this post, my friends and I used to joke that Arachnophobia was a good "action movie." This is because I first saw it with two of them on a triple date, where I ended up making out with my date there in the theater, and then my second viewing was with a different girl I was dating, and we also paused the viewing (which was at her house) to pash a bit. So in both cases I "got action," to use parlance we would have been more likely to use back at that time. 

I can't remember if there was a third viewing at any point, or if Saturday night's viewing was the third, but suffice it to say that after 17 years of marriage, stopping a movie to kiss is not something my wife and I do much anymore. 

I did have some qualms about how well this movie related to the script she's actually writing, which involves giant spiders. (That's why we're watching spider movies right now.) The arachnids in Arachnophobia get their creepy qualities from their quantity, not their unusual size. 

Which is most assuredly a good thing, as we will discuss.

I decided Arachnophobia would be a good movie to watch because it was a good movie. If it also got her "spider juices flowing" -- yes that was a phrase she objected to -- then all the better. 

But I realized there was a more fundamental way than size of the spiders that Arachnophobia differs from the spider movies made today, and from the movie that will get made from the script she's writing:

The spiders in Arachnophobia were real.

Or if not real, they were practical animatronic spiders that looked good enough to be real. 

This is something we will never see again.

I don't constantly write to you on this blog about how digital effects have ruined the movies. The truth of the matter is, digital effects done well, or done for the first time, have given me some incredibly memorable viewing experiences, responsible for movies I cherish. I don't know how they would have tried to do Starship Troopers without digital arachnids, for example. (It isn't really a giant spider movie as such, but it sort of is, especially since they do call them arachnids.)

Even if I don't write about the diminishing returns of digital effects a lot, I do think about them a lot. (Especially when I watch a movie like Snow White, which I watched the night before Arachnophobia.) If I don't say it more, that's probably because saying that digital effects have ruined the magic of movies feels like a boring take, as well as a little bit old man-ish. They have their time and their place, but those places are getting fewer and those times are getting farther between.

And Arachnophobia is not so squirmingly delightful if it uses digital creepy crawlies. It only works as well as it does because some dedicated and skilled professional spider wrangler got together a bunch of spiders and created the necessary conditions for them to crawl out all over the walls and ceilings, on queue, while the camera was rolling. If the camera didn't get it, they'd have to wrangle all those spiders and get them back on their marks to do it all over again.

We will never see this again, and in fact, "spider wrangler" may no longer exist as a job.

Even if wrangling spiders is not expensive, though I have to imagine there's a considerable cost to it, it's expensive in terms of logistics and time taken on set. I don't know how many shots it took to get some of what they had here, but if even one of them had be reshot, I wouldn't be surprised if it required a full hour to be ready to yell "Action!" again. Not worth it when you can just make a fully compliant spider, which always hits its mark, on the computer, right?

In horror films, which Arachnophobia nominally is (it's really more akin to something like Gremlins), there's been a movement to return to practical horror effects, at least as an element that distinguishes you from the other horror movies around you. We get a couple each year, and fans of the horror of yesteryear will flock to them. 

You don't see the same hearkening back to the bug wrangling of yesteryear. If a bunch of spiders needed to come out of a sink drain in a movie made today, as they do in Arachnophobia, I guarantee you those spiders are just a bunch of ones and zeroes.

But it's not just that today's version of Arachnophobia is digital. It's that today's version of Arachnophobia is non-existent.

When was the last time you saw a movie in which escaping small, deadly creatures was even supportable as the primary threat of the movie?

That's why all spiders at the movies are now big spiders, and all big spiders have to be digital. 

Because if using real spiders is too quaint and too expensive by half for today's movies, just imagine how quaint it would be to try to used forced perspective to make a small spider look big. 

I think what makes our skin crawl when watching Arachnophobia is knowing that the spiders are real. That even if the actors were in no danger because the spiders were harmless, the actors were indeed in that space with those spiders. Their reactions to the spiders are, in some ways, real, which makes their reactions contagious to us in the audience.

With digital spiders, all you get is a contagious case of ennui. 

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