Some things terrify pretty much everybody. We’re all freaked out by ghosts, monsters, moving shadows, creepy crawlies. There are few things more universally freaky than spiders, with their too many legs and too many eyes and penchant for scuttling and biting and web spinning. They’re spooky shorthand, always showing up in Halloween decorations and movies about witches, symbolizing hidden threats and ancient structures fallen into disrepair.
From their sharp fangs to their hairy legs and their way of running on their tiptoes across your hands and feet, everything about spiders seems designed to make us shiver. Spiders show up as set dressing in plenty of horror films, but occasionally they’re given their own time to shine, starring as the eight-legged menaces terrorizing small towns and haunting people’s dreams.
For this list, we’ve chosen ten spider movies — movies that star spiders as the villains or contain some iconic freaky depiction of arachnids that’s particularly memorable — that showcase the range of these buggy beasts, and their cinematic evolution over the decades. Crackpot science experiments make them grow to giant sizes, gateways to hell or other dimensions allow them a bloody, gruesome taste of our world, campfire stories tap into our deepest fears about their reproductive practices. They infest small towns, chase child wizards through magical forests, and pop up in our dreams to symbolize some dark, looming anxiety.
There’s a reason spiders are so iconic, and these movies prove exactly why.
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