Trivia / Arachnophobia

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• California Doubling: The opening and jungle scenes were filmed in Venezuela, while the rest of the film was shot in Cambria, California.
• Completely Different Title: In Sweden the movie is known as "Imse vimse spindel" translating as "Itsy Bitsy Spider".
• Dueling Dubs: The first Latin American dub of the film was produced at Intersound in Los Angeles for an initial VHS release in 1990. The second dub was produced at Made in Spanish in Mexico for the 2002 DVD release and all other releases since.
• Fake American: Alberta-born Frances Bay plays the Californian Evelyn Metcalf.
• Follow the Leader: The film takes a few cues from Kingdom of the Spiders.
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: The film was originally meant to be a straight-up horror film. However, both Jeff Daniels and Frank Marshall wanted to make the film "a black comedy with a more ironic tone" and the script went through several rewrites, most notably including the addition of Ross Jennings's fear of spiders. The end result of the film's script included both horror and comedic elements.
• Never Work with Children or Animals: The filmmakers had to go to great care, since they were working with real spiders. One scene of a spider simply being sprayed with insecticide and then squashed had John Goodman spray a dummy spider and then put on boots with a hollowed out sole for the squash shot (so the spider could just curl up inside and wait for the next take). Likewise when books were dropped on the spiders for the shot, the books themselves were hollowed out. As spiders can't be trained, the filmmakers had to resort to certain tricks - such as vibrating wires and certain furniture wax (that the spiders would avoid walking on). A fake drain was used for shots of spiders being washed away, and they were quickly removed.
• Referenced by...: Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation spoofed the film as Skunknophobia. Shirley and Fowlmouth's subplot of the film culminates with them seeing Skunknophobia at the ACME Mega Multiplex theater. Fowlmouth has seen Skunknophobia 100 times before and will not stop talking throughout the film, eventually ticking off the other customers so much that they throw him into the movie screen, where the cast of Skunknophobia tell him off for talking during the film.
• Signature Scene: Becky Beechwood taking her shower & getting scared out of her mind by a spider.
• Spared by the Cut: Sheriff Parsons originally died in a deleted scene, where he's bitten by a spider and dies in a car crash. It was cut for pacing reasons.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The ending of the film was originally going to reference The Birds, but Steven Spielberg nixed that idea.
  • When the film was redubbed for a Latin American DVD release in the early 2000s, voice actress Alma Wilheleme was going to direct it at Mexico City's Made in Spanish studio. However, it turned out that Wilheleme also suffers from arachnophobia in real-life and consequently, she decided not to direct it. Gabriel Cobayassi, Made in Spanish's founder and a veteran voice actor in his own right, would eventually direct the dub.

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