Arachnophobia (1990)

The 1990 creature feature Arachnophobia arrives from the Spielberg-adjacent Amblin factory with a single, uncluttered objective: to make audiences squirm. Frank Marshall, directing for the first time, stages the invasion of the fictional California town of Canaima with the efficiency of a man who has studied Hitchcock's The Birds and concluded the birds should be spiders. Jeff Daniels plays Ross Jennings, a San Francisco physician who relocates to the countryside for a quieter life and receives, instead, a lethal arachnid colony in his barn.

The film's cultural ledger is remarkably empty. The ensemble is white, the gender roles are drawn from a 1950s catalog, and the female characters exist to be bitten, widowed, or reassured. No racial themes intrude on the Venezuelan prologue, which functions purely as an exotic delivery mechanism for the general. Capitalism escapes scrutiny: the exterminator Delbert McClintock, played with relish by John Goodman, is the town's hero precisely because he shows up, charges money, and kills things. Bodies are present only to be desiccated. There is no messaging to be extracted here, no sermon, no moral instruction tucked into the closing credits.

The result is a machine for thrills, and it runs clean. Critics at the time called it slick and oddly unresonant, which reads today as praise of a certain kind. The film does not wish to improve us. It wishes to make us check our shoes before putting them on. Steven Kutcher's three hundred Avondale spiders perform with more conviction than most human casts, and the sound of crushed mustard packets has never been put to nobler ends. A remake is reportedly in development, which raises the question of what contemporary sensibilities might be grafted onto a premise this innocent. Let us hope the spiders retain top billing.