Insect Fear Film Festival to feature ‘hairy, scary’ tarantulas

The 2025 Insect Fear Film Festival at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will feature “Tarantulas: Hairy, Scary Spiders” as its theme and a Hollywood bug wrangler who works with the 8-legged creatures as a special guest.

The festival, which is hosted by the Entomology Graduate Student Association and is in its 42nd year, is Saturday, Feb. 22 at Foellinger Auditorium. It is free and open to the public.

The film festival has featured spiders in the past, but it has never focused solely on tarantulas. Spiders, including tarantulas, are not insects. They are classified as arachnids, based on having two main body regions and eight legs, whereas insects have three main body regions and six legs. Insects and spiders, however, are both classified as arthropods, animals with external skeletons and jointed appendages.

Tarantulas are quite popular for moviemakers because they are large and easy to see, said festival founder May Berenbaum, who is the head of the entomology department, a Swanlund Endowed Chair of entomology and the director of the Center for Advanced Study.

The feature film is “Arachnophobia,” a comedy/horror movie — a “thrill-omedy,” according to the producers — made in 1990 and starring Jeff Daniels as a doctor who recently moved to a small town and must deal with a deadly infestation of spiders. His character is, of course, terrified of spiders. John Goodman plays an exterminator.

The festival often shows low-budget horror movies in keeping with its tagline, “scaring the general public with horrific films and horrific filmmaking.” But “Arachnophobia” is a big-budget ($22 million) movie made by Amblin Entertainment, Steven Spielberg’s production company.

“It’s a pretty good movie as these movies go,” Berenbaum said.

Even so, it gets some spider facts wrong. The movie shows scenes with spider webs, but tarantulas don’t spin orb webs. They do spin silk to line their nests, Berenbaum said.

The characters in the movie are searching for the nest of the deadly spiders to find and kill the queen and save the town. But tarantulas don’t live in societies with a queen, she said. “If they were to live together in groups, they’d probably end up eating each other.

“That’s another thing that so often occurs in insect fear films: Any time you have a movie arthropod bent on attacking humans, screenwriters think they must live in a society with a queen as honeybees do. That is just not the case,” Berenbaum said.

There also is a scene in the movie showing an entomologist collecting species from a rainforest in Venezuela, and some of the insects shown in the scene are not native to Venezuela, she said.

While the tarantulas in the movie are deadly, most in real life are not, although their bites can be painful, Berenbaum said. Deadly venom is more often found in smaller spiders that can’t overpower their prey, she said.

There are about 1,000 species of tarantulas, and the biggest have bodies that are 5 inches or more long, with a leg span of 11-12 inches. The fangs of the goliath birdeater are 1 1/2 inches long, and there are species that can hunt and eat vertebrates such as mice, lizards and birds, Berenbaum said.

The main risk for people, though, is the detachable hairs on the abdomen of the spider, which they can fling at their enemies, including humans. These hairs can cause irritation, particularly if they get in the eyes or nose, she said. Although they seem scary, tarantulas are often kept as pets, and some species can live for 30 years or more.

Special guest Steven Kutcher, known as “The Bug Man of Hollywood,” is an entomologist who works with insects and arthropods on movies, including “Arachnophobia.” He manipulates the behaviors of the creatures to get the desired action onscreen. Before the feature film, Kutcher will talk about his work and show a clip reel from the movies, TV shows, commercials and music videos for which he’s worked with insects and arthropods.

In addition to the feature film and Kutcher’s talk and clip reel, the festival will include:

An insect petting zoo, including tarantulas.

Bugscope, a scanning electron microscope from the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology that will show close-up images of tarantulas and other arthropods.

Collections of pinned insects, including from Tommy McElrath, the insect collection curator for the Illinois Natural History Survey.

Insect crafts.

A gallery of insect and arthropod art from local K-12 students who participated in the festival’s art contest.

Ventriloquist Hannah Leskosky — Berenbaum’s daughter — and her tarantula puppet.

Maggot art, in which Kutcher dips mealworms in nontoxic paint and lets them wander across a canvas. In the past, he turned the resulting paintings into greeting cards.

Activities begin at 5 p.m. and the film introductions begin at 7 p.m.

Editor’s notes: To contact May Berenbaum, email maybe@illinois.edu. More information about the Insect Fear Film Festival is available online.