Earth vs. the Spider

Earth vs. the Spider (1958)

The Spider will eat you alive!

Teenagers from a small town and their high school science teacher join forces to battle a giant mutant spider, living in a cave nearby and getting hungry.

Date of release
1958-09-01
TMDB
4.8 / 10 (73)
Runtime
1h 13m
Genres
Horror, Science Fiction
Director
Bert I. Gordon

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: $146K

Earth vs. the Spider is an independently made 1958 American black-and-white science fiction horror film produced and directed for Santa Rosa Productions by Bert I. Gordon, who also provided the plot upon which the screenplay by George Worthing Yates and Laszlo Gorog was based. Though the title suggests a global crisis, the film focuses entirely on a small town being terrorized by a giant spider.

Production

The film's original on-screen title was Earth vs. the Spider, but when The Fly (also released in 1958) became a blockbuster, the title was shortened to just The Spider on all of the advertising material. The original screen title, however, was never changed, so the film is frequently referred to by the title Earth vs. the Spider.

The movie theater in which Mike Simpson (Gene Persson) works displays a film poster prominently advertising The Amazing Colossal Man, while the marquee shows that it is currently running Attack of the Puppet People, which happens to also star Ed Kenney. Both of these films were also directed by Bert I. Gordon.

Some of the cave interiors were filmed using stills from Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, with live action scenes filmed at Bronson Caves in Griffith Park near Los Angeles. Special effects expert Paul Blaisdell created a life-size giant spider leg to use in the film, as well as a desiccated, mummy-like corpse that was used to represent the spider's victims in several scenes.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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