Spectators may have their own preferences when it comes to choosing their favorite creature features, such as Alien, Predator, The Thing, The Fly, Tremors, and countless others. What audiences find fascinating about creature features is how scary and gruesome they are, along with the shock factor, inventive visual effects, and action sequences.
Creature features are also intriguing because they display how humans interact with monsters or entities that they don't fully understand. Arachnophobia is a 1990 horror comedy involving a small town in California where citizens begin to die due to venomous spiders, and how a doctor tries to eliminate this threat for the sake of humanity.
What is Arachnophobia about?
Arachnophobia centers on Dr. Ross Jennings (Jeff Daniels), a family physician who recently moved into a new house in Canaima, California with his wife and children. Ross tries his best to settle into his new hometown. However, when healthy individuals are found dead due to unknown circumstances, the physician is looked at negatively (with many nicknaming him Dr. Death) since people are dying on his watch.
Ross also has a tremendous fear of spiders, especially after seeing them outside his house and in his barn. After three deaths in Canaima, Ross correctly suspects that spiders are biting and killing people. In order to get confirmation on his theory, Ross contacts Dr. James Atherton (the late Julian Sands), a British entomologist whose expertise is analyzing insects.
Coincidentally, a new species of spider Atherton encountered on a mountain in Venezuela that killed his photographer is the same one that ended up in Canaima and produced plenty of offspring that could kill everyone in town. Ross, Atherton, and other specialists (including the funny exterminator Delbert McClintock in Canaima) try to track down all the spiders before they spread and kill more people.
What makes Arachnophobia a great creature feature?
While creature features can generally be considered predictable and formulaic (as well as overly grotesque and violent), Arachnophobia is that rare horror comedy that successfully manages to be funny and mildly scary without going overboard. Also given that the film is rated PG-13 rather than R-rated, the feature goes for genuine thrills and scares instead of graphic violence like in other movies such as Species or Starship Troopers.
The spiders in the film may not appear to be the scariest or most horrifying creatures, but they are slow, sneaky, and deadly in the plot of this film. The timing and visual effects fully display how these spiders operate, especially in scenes where spiders sneak up on other characters and animals and subtly attack them. There are also moments when individuals are close to being bitten but, without noticing, manage to avoid the spiders.
There's also some inspired casting in Arachnophobia, particularly Jeff Daniels' central performance as Ross Jennings. Daniels is a versatile actor (known for Dumb and Dumber and Speed) who knows how to balance drama and comedy. As Ross, Daniels portrays him as an Everyman who is a family man, a persistent doctor, and a scared, vulnerable person trying to overcome his fear of spiders. Julian Sands' role as Atherton is one of focus and fascination since his character is intrigued by spiders, and John Goodman's brief role as exterminator McClintock is comical in the way he calmly acts when wiping out dangerous spiders.
How does Arachnophobia end?
During the conclusion of Arachnophobia, Atherton manages to find the spider nest in Ross's barn but is then bitten and killed by a big spider. McClintock encounters Atherton's body and then proceeds to spray and kill several spiders in the barn and around Ross's house. Meanwhile, Ross and Atherton's assistant, Chris Collins, get Ross's family out of the house for their own safety. Ross nearly gets out of his home but then falls through the wooden floor of his living room and into his wine cellar.
While attempting to escape the cellar, Ross finds himself battling the general and the queen spiders (both of which are protecting a large egg sac). Ross manages to overcome his fear of spiders by electrocuting the queen, as well as shooting the general with a nail gun and burning it along with the egg sac. McClintock gets Ross out of the cellar as all the spiders are burning and dying. After the debacle, Ross and his family return to San Francisco to go back to city life, leaving behind life in the country.
However, when the family is back in San Francisco, an earthquake occurs, signifying that there's always a problem regardless of where one lives. Arachnophobia may be a relatively familiar creature feature, but the characters (especially Ross, Atherton, and McClintock) are convincing as everyday people who are either petrified or engrossed by spiders and manage to find a way to overcome tremendous fears and obstacles in a dangerous situation.
Arachnophobia is also a feature that reveals both the beauty and horror of spiders. This is evident at the beginning of the film when Atherton and his photographer are viewing spiders in Venezuela, surrounded by mountainous rock, water, and webs. The spiders initially look appealing, but then are tricky and lethal when attacking others. Considering that the film was released in 1990, Arachnophobia was not only inspired by horror films of the 80s, but also paved the way for other creature features in the 90s and 2000s like Jurassic Park, Eight Legged Freaks, and Slither in terms of humans facing off against monstrous entities in the ongoing dilemma between man versus nature.