Arachnophobia

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

Why do you think many people are scared of spiders? Are you?

Depictions in the media

One big reason, I believe that people share spiders is because the way they’ve been portrayed in our culture throughout a time. They become a synonymous with decay, and things that are abandoned. We’ve seen them alongside depictions of the supernatural and the occult.

It was these same negative feelings about spiders that resulted in Marvel Comics giving Stan Lee some brushback when he initially created Spider-Man back in the 1960s. His publishers told him “people won’t buy a book about somebody dressed up like a spider”. Thankfully, they saw how popular the character was and relented .

While it wasn’t the cultural phenomenon that the 1975 movie Jaws was, 1990 gave us the modest hit movie Arachnophobia in which a family’s home becomes infested with spiders; culminating with a showdown with a giant “queen” arachnid. I was 15 years old when this movie came out. I probably didn’t see it almost for another 10 years. While Arachnophobia did not trigger some deep underlying fear of spiders in me, it most certainly intensified it. Don’t plan on me doing any “retro review“ of that movie; because I have no intention of watching it ever again.

Their hunter nature

This ties in with the way that spiders have been depicted over the years, but the fact that the spiders create their own lair- like webs in which they trapped other insects that they plan to eat certainly goes along way towards terrifying people as well.

They’re ugly

I think many people are afraid of spiders because they are – for the lack of a better term – alien looking.

Spiders, unlike like chimps or apes who are biped, have two legs and somewhat resemble humans. They’re not even like mammals who have legs and a head and a torso.

Well, it’s true that spiders resemble many other insects, and are “alien looking” and that sense, an ex figure so much more common place than other bugs. They very somewhat in sizes. A summer heartless, summer actually poisonous. But the idea that they walk around on eight legs are still a little unnerving I think for most people.

It’s funny that spiders are the subject of this particular conversation, as kid 1 decided to start getting spiders as pets roughly a year ago. He has two tarantulas, if I recall correctly.

Tarantulas.

Not one, but two.

I hope he plans on taking those things to college, because I don’t think his mom is going to look after them. I sure as hell won’t.

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