It is one of life’s great mysteries, at least for me, that there aren’t more films made about spiders. Preferably great big giant ones. They constantly top the lists of ‘most scary things ever’, and so, in an era of horror movie-making where directors turn to such unlikely quarters as pool cleaning robots and Teddy Ruxpin for our frights (Paranormal Activity 2 and 3 respectively), why are spiders not exploited more in the movies?

There are, of course, plenty of reasons why nobody (other than SyFy and The Asylum, who both seem to have an almost fetishistic fondness for all things spider and shark-related) is particularly interested in making these movies. The main reason being that generally, they’re just not very good. There’s not a great deal you can do with improbably enormous arachnids, other than have them lumber around deserts and small towns eating the occasional human victim.

Unfortunately, that storyline was pretty much exhausted back in the 50s. Every now and then, though, some arachnophile filmmaker gives us another webby gem to add to the not entirely glorious canon of spider-movies. Here are some of the best (I use the term ‘best’ extremely loosely) examples of spiders in the movies.

Arachnophobia (1990)