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Tarantula
1955 Movie Poster
Directed by	Jack Arnold
Produced by	William Alland
Written by	Robert M. Fresco Martin Berkeley from a story by Ray Bradbury uncredited.
Starring	John Agar Mara Corday Leo G. Carroll
Music by	Herman Stein
Cinematography	George Robinson
Editing by	William Morgan
Distributed by	Universal International Pictures
Release date(s)	December 14, 1955
Running time	81 min.
Language	English
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Tarantula is a 1955 science fiction film directed by Jack Arnold, and starring Leo G. Carroll, John Agar, and Mara Corday. Among other things, the film is notable for the appearance of a 25-year-old Clint Eastwood in an uncredited role as a jet pilot at the end of the film.

The plot concerns a biological researcher, Professor Gerald Deemer (Carroll) who is trying to prevent the food shortages which will result from the world's expanding population. With the help of atomic science, he invents a special nutrient on which animals can live exclusively, but which causes them to grow to many times their normal size. In his laboratory, he houses several oversized rodents and, inexplicably, a tarantula.

When his researchers try the nutrient, they develop runaway acromegaly and one of them is driven mad, half destroys the lab (freeing the animals) and attacks Deemer and injects him with the solution. As a result, Deemer gradually becomes more and more deformed while the now-gigantic tarantula ravages the countryside. A sympathetic doctor (Agar) and Deemer's female assistant (Corday) investigate the mystery of the clean-picked cattle bones and the eight-foot pools of arachnid venom, and the spider is eventually destroyed, after several failed attempts, by a napalm attack launched from a fighter squadron led by young pre-famous Clint Eastwood.

The special effects for both the giant animals and the unfortunate scientist's deformity are fairly advanced for the time, with real animals (including a rabbit and a guinea pig in Professor Deemer's lab) being used to represent the giant creatures. A real spider was also used for shots where the whole monster was shown, with models reserved for close-ups (and its skyscraper-sized version), resulting in a rather more convincing monster than the giant ants in the previous year's big-bug film, Them!.

Like Them!, Tarantula makes atmospheric use of its desert locations; and although a radioactive isotope does make an appearance, it differs from most big-bug films in having the mutation caused by the peaceful research of a well-intentioned scientist rather than nuclear weapons and/or a mad genius. Arnold was to use matte effects again two years later to show miniaturisation rather than gigantism in The Incredible Shrinking Man, which also featured an encounter with a spider.

The poster shown here contains at least two factual errors. One is that it shows the tarantula with only two eyes instead of eight. The other is that it shows the creature carrying a woman in its fangs, a la Fay Wray in King Kong, a scene which never appears in the film.

• In the musical The Rocky Horror Show, and its film adaptation, the opening song Science Fiction/Double Feature references many classic films and it does this one with the line: "I knew Leo G. Carroll was over a barrel when Tarantula took to the hills".

• Tarantula at the Internet Movie Database
• Tarantula at All Movie Guide
• Suite of the film score re-recorded on "Monstrous Movie Music" label (sound samples available)