A cult horror comedy from the 90s, “Arachnophobia” features real spiders. Spiders that actually had to audition to be allowed to scare people on screen!
Who remembers Arachnophobia? This cult horror comedy from the 90s, led by Jeff Daniels, played on the fear that many people feel when faced with spiders, thus joining the long list of films exploiting phobias.
Directed by an entertainment ace, the famous producer Frank Marshall (Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, The Goonies…), the feature film Arachnophobie makes you laugh but also scares you. And if so many shivers run down the spines of the spectators, it is probably because the spiders shown on the screen are real.
Here, no room for CGI, these are real hairy beasts, in this case specimens from New Zealand and Australia called Delena cancerides and belonging to the Sparassidae family. Harmless and venom-free spiders but with looooong legs and veryy …
Having chosen to use real spiders for the sake of authenticity, the team atArachnophobie went further in perfectionism by actually having the critters audition! The director Frank Marshallparticularly proud to have had at his disposal the “Olympic spiders”surrounded himself with Steve Kutcher, a renowned American entomologist, to carry out the “tests”.
Auditions with… a hair dryer!
Frank Marshall “cast” the spiders to see if they were scary, but also wanted to assess their ability to climb a window or their motivation to move, which he tested using a hair dryer! “We had a place where spiders were stored, with different drawers in which there were some that could climb better than others. It was really a troupe of “comedians” with different talents.”notes the filmmaker.
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