But then the next day, there were about seven more! The next day, there were three more of the long black things. It was disappointing that it was shedding its exoskeleton piecemeal, but I explained to my roommates that I could perhaps glue the pieces together.
#Arachnophilia guide skin#
I concluded that it must be the molted skin of a single leg of the tarantula. Then, one day, I noticed a strange black object in the cage, sort of like a matchstick that had been burned along its entire length. Meanwhile, the weeks went by, and the tarantula still hadn't shed its skin. It's a remarkable phenomenon, and I couldn't wait for it to happen. When tarantulas molt, they shed their entire exoskeleton as a single piece, which basically looks like a complete tarantula. I told them that I was eagerly waiting for it to shed its skin. The other students in the yeshivah were variously fascinated or horrified by it, especially since it would sometimes rear up in attack mode (as seen in this picture), and some of them wanted me to get rid of it. One day, we happened to find a tarantula in the street! I promptly captured it and housed it in a cage in my apartment.
And I was still obsessed with the movie, and I kept daydreaming: what would happen if an unknown species of dangerous spider were to materialize in my neighborhood? What if I was like the doctor in the movie, aware that there was a mysterious arachnid phenomenon and nobody believed me? I spent literally years dreaming about this.Ī few years later, I was studying in yeshiva in Jerusalem. I went out and bought a tarantula, which I named Big Bob and kept carefully hidden from my mother in my closet. I was fascinated by exotic creatures, and so I was determined to overcome my fears. But in my case, it was simultaneously accompanied by a developing arachnophilia (love of spiders). The doctor around whom the story is centered struggles to explain the mysterious deaths, for which people are blaming him, until he finally realizes the arachnid explanation and has to tackle the spiders - which is particularly stressful for him, given that he suffers from arachnophobia.Īlthough rated PG, the suspense and shocks in that film were extremely intense if you didn't suffer from arachnophobia going into it, you certainly suffered from it coming out. This ingeniously produced comedy-horror was about a newly discovered species of Venezuelan tarantula that accidentally hitches a ride in a coffin to a small town in America, where it hybridizes with a local spider to produce a litter of deadly offspring.
#Arachnophilia guide movie#
Over thirty years ago, as a teenager, I was very much taken by a movie called Arachnophobia.
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