Calif. town where ’90s cult classic was shot is infested with fans

For a coastal California town, Halloween will come a few weekends early this year, when an entire community will have the chance to cosplay once more as its movie alter ego. 

Welcome to Canaima, a picturesque oceanfront village, where a young doctor named Ross Jennings (played by Jeff Daniels) moved his family from the hustle and bustle of San Francisco to take over from a retiring small town physician. But thousands of eight-legged co-stars had other ideas, and soon wreaked havoc on Jennings’ idyllic vision of life in a small town. 

This weekend, Cambria, the Central Coast enclave, which served as the stand in community for Canaima in the jump scare classic “Arachnophobia,” will turn out to celebrate the film’s 35th anniversary. 

Locals will take the moment to reflect on the time the town was overrun not just by spiders, but some of the top names in Hollywood, for a special screening of the film on Saturday. The event will come complete with a short documentary on the production, a Q&A, and some memories from locals. 

For many in Cambria, being a part of “Arachnophobia” is a year-round job — a task they’re happy to attend to.

“Our home was in the movie,” Cambria Film Festival co-director Jeff Plummer told SFGATE on Tuesday. Plummer and his family moved to the sleepy town in 1997. Right away, they noticed what it was like to be in the spotlight because of a cult classic. “When we moved here, people would drive by the house and take pictures,” he said. “We put two and two together and connected the movie to the town.”

Over the decades, as the film’s popularity, and stature, has grown, the drive-bys haven’t ebbed, Plummer said. “There are people out there that visit movie locations. That’s their thing, they put it on YouTube,” he explained, noting that their home makes a cameo in many such posts. “It’s kind of fun.”

Plummer said it was a “no-brainer” to shine the light on “Arachnophobia” as part of his duties as the town’s film festival director. 

“My wife had the idea a couple years ago knowing the anniversary was coming up,” he said. “We put a call out to locals. My sons, who are filmmakers, helped us document a few people who still live here. We put together a short piece that will show before the film, highlighting the locations and the people.”

And when the announcement came through that there would be a special screening this fall, the response, he said, was “immediate.”

“It’s really cool,” he said. “People still really care about this movie.”

“Arachnophobia” was the directorial debut of Frank Marshall. Marshall, 79, looms large in the minds of virtually every film geek, and is one of the rare individuals who lays claim to an EGOT (an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony). His breakthrough was as an executive producer on the cult classic “The Warriors.” In 1981, he co-founded Amblin Entertainment with his future wife, Kathleen Kennedy, along with Stephen Spielberg. He then went on to work side-by-side with Spielberg to help create generation-defining classics like “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “The Goonies,” “Back to the Future” and “The Color Purple.” 

Marshall even spent time behind the camera, often with Spielberg. One day, on the set of 1989’s sweeping forest fire epic “Always,” he got a surprise visit from friend Jeffrey Katzenberg, then head of Walt Disney Studios, who came to him with an opportunity. “He threw the script down on the couch and said, ‘I think it’s time for you to step up to the first chair,’” Marshall told SFGATE.

Marshall said he, and his business partners, were a little skeptical at first about him taking on a feature. But then he read the script and decided that the little movie about a small town overrun with spiders might be just the thing for his debut. 

“It was kind of the perfect story for me to make that first step,” he said. “It’s kind of a B-movie, so it wasn’t going to put the kind of pressure you might have with a more elaborate story. So I said yes. And I used ‘The Birds’ as kind of my inspiration. ‘The Birds’ wasn’t about birds, it’s a love story.”

So with “The Birds” and 1950s horror classic “Them” in mind, Marshall worked on the script to make a ’90s version of the films that informed his youth.

“I grew up loving horror movies,” he said. “Thrillers, not bloody. I like scary thrillers. So I also felt that the scariest thing about spiders is they could be anywhere and are everywhere and that really freaked people out. What was fun was to scare people and have a laugh and break the tension. That’s why Jeff Daniels is so brilliant. And then you want to go all the way to the other side, and that’s why John Goodman’s character is outrageous.”

Then, with a slight pause, he recalled one pivotal scene that perhaps changed how folks go about one basic daily routine: “When I pick up slippers, I still check them and dump them out before I put them on,” he laughed. 

As for choosing Cambria, he said initially the talk was to shoot the film on the East Coast. “I wanted an idyllic Norman Rockwell town, a little town where nothing ever happens,” Marshall said. But because the shooting schedule landed in the heart of winter, location scouts had to scramble to find a place on the West Coast. And that’s when one of them discovered Cambria. 

“There’s a cute little Main Street and a high school and a place we could build a house,” he said. “We made the whole movie there. It was perfect; the nature, the beauty — charming and idyllic.”

Although Jeff Daniels and John Goodman may get top billing, perhaps the real star of the film is Steven R. Kutcher. He served as the film’s official “spider wrangler” and is slated to be on hand Saturday at the screening to answer questions about his role with the film. 

In the mid-1970s, Kutcher, 81, had just graduated with a master’s degree in insect behavior. Before going after his Ph.D., he got an opportunity to work on the set of the “Exorcist II: The Heretic,” where he was in charge of wrangling 3,000 locusts for a pivotal scene. 

“It worked out,” he said, “but I thought that was the end of that.”

Hollywood had other ideas. Kutcher’s work on the Exorcist sequel was noticed right away, and suddenly, TV shows and films came knocking on his door. 

Soon, he became known as a bug whisperer. His career took him to the sets of some of the best-known films of the past few decades: the original “Jurassic Park,” Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” and most pre-CGI films that featured real-life creepy crawlers you can think of. 

He’s even responsible for one of the scariest scenes in modern cinema in the movie “Fright Night 2.” “There’s a scene where bugs pour out of a stomach, one of my favorites,” he said. “I challenge CGI to do anything like that.”

Director Marshall confirms that using real spiders was the right call and helped make the feature more timeless and, perhaps, long-lasting: “CGI wasn’t to the point where we could use it,” he said. “But when the spiders come out of that sink — they explode out of that sink — those were real.”

Even with an insect expert like Kutcher on board, Marshall said it was a heady task as a first-time director to shoot the prima donna insects who took command of key scenes. “They were method actors,” he said with a chuckle. “They kind of did their own thing.”

In exchange for wrangling these tiny thespians with ideas of their own, “Arachnophobia” became Kutcher’s signature film and a career-maker. “I was underpaid, boy, was I underpaid,” he said. “But word got out after that movie launched, and I got another and another.”

While he may not have made much on the spidery set, the work that came after the film paid for his house, he said. His time on the “Arachnophobia” set even rewarded him with a cameo in the movie, alongside Julian Sands in a laboratory scene, for which he earned an extra $40.

Kutcher said his work on “Arachnophobia” started months before production began in January 1990 and predated the arrival of director Marshall. 

“They gave me a month or two to research all the spider stuff,” he said, explaining how he decided that the Avondale spider, also known as Delena cancerides, would fill the majority of the live spider roles in the film. 

The spiders were imported from New Zealand. Once in Cambria, it was up to Kutcher and his crew to vet and train the spiders. “We had a spider Olympics to decide which spider could do what,” he said. “And then you have to figure out, how do you make them go left or right, go into a place from 4 feet away? How do you make them jump?”

Getting a spider to jump to a specific height was a time-consuming task, especially to do it all humanely, he said. Since all bugs are unique, Kutcher had to match each spider’s skills to their particular roles. 

“We had about 500 spiders, not counting tarantulas. There were special spider containers and each spider had a cup where we could put them back in,” he said, noting that through rehearsal he was able to get the spiders to complete their scenes in just a couple of takes.

Human extras in the town also got a shot at movie glory. “Cambria viewers will recognize their postmaster, Luis Gonzales; local goldsmith Joel Hauser; and Harmony Pasta Factory owners Dennis and [Christina] Dillow, among those who greet Canaima’s new doctor, Ross Jennings, played by Jeff Daniels,” the San Luis Obispo Tribune reported on July 14, 1990. “And ‘Arachnophobia’ should give the Coast Union High School Broncos an ego boost. Past and present members of the school football team have a big scene on the field and in the locker room.”

A handful of Coast Union High School football players were featured, the article said, including CUHS standouts Noah Arnold, Jake Preston and Lesty Sala. The high school’s real-life principal Walt Retzlaff and his daughter Julie also made the cut. In addition, Cambrians Nathan Spitzley and Jay Powell had lines and “seemed to pull off their one-line speaking parts in the movie with ease,” the Tribune reported. 

Director Marshall recalled having a blast with the people in Cambria and even falling in love a little bit with the place. He said he still visits from time to time. “About 10 years ago, we came though Cambria, Kathy and I had lunch,” he said. “We really considered getting a place there. You can fly into SLO pretty easily from LA and then you have this place with a lot of charm and beauty — especially the natural beauty of the coastline.”

But what about the name Canaima? Marshall let slip a little Easter egg about Cambria’s alter ego. The film’s early jungle scenes were shot in a small village at the edge of the jungle in Venezuela. “It was just a landing strip and a vacation hotel,” Marshall recalled. “That town was named Canaima.”

Cambria Film Festival director Plummer said he expects a few “notable guests” — including some locals who were in the movie and are still around — will attend the screening. The big names — director Marshall, Daniels, Goodman and Steven Spielberg (who co-produced the film) — will likely only be there in spirit, but a special surprise does await those who were lucky enough to get tickets. The event sold out quickly, he said. 

Even if you’re not there in person to see the movie on Saturday, Plummer said not to worry, the Canaima spirit lives in the heart of every Cambrian year-round. 

But the classic is also a phenomenon, he admits, that excludes a select population, including a member of his own family, which made growing up in Cambria a little more difficult: “Every time we mention ‘Arachnophobia,’ we still get people who say, ‘There’s no way I could watch it.’ Our oldest son has arachnophobia — he can’t deal with spiders.”