John Martin George Burrows Candy Collins Delores Fuller Dean Reisner Doris Lee Price Mona McKinnon Sherry Moreland Ginger Sherry Chris Randall Dianne Fortier Karna Greene June Benbow Katina Vea Fred Kelsey End credits Jackie Coogan as Doctor Aranya Richard Travis as Dan Mulcahey Allan Nixon as "Doc" Tucker Mary Hill as Doreen Robert Knapp as Grant Phillips Chris Pin Martin as Pepe Harmon Stevens as Masterson Nico Lek as Van Croft Samuel Wu as Wu John Martin as Frank Tandra Quinn as Tarantella Production The film was originally made by Pergor Productions under the title Tarantula and was viewed and granted a Motion Picture Production Code seal in October 1951. When the producers had difficulty in securing a distributor, Howco Productions Inc. bought the film in the spring of 1952 and assigned Ron Ormond to direct additional footage for the film. Tandra Quinn recalled that Ormond took several months after Tevos completed filming and shot additional sequences, including new ones with Jackie Coogan and Quinn's characters being shot, which was not in the original version. Katherine Victor remembered that she was hired by Ormond to have her desert sequences added to the film, as the original film was not able to be picked up for distribution. One of the dwarfs of the film was Angelo Rossitto, whose film career had started in the 1920s. He was a veteran of Poverty Row horror films. Director Herbert Tevos, born Herbert Schoellenbach, reportedly claimed to have had a film career in his native Germany and to have directed films starring Marlene Dietrich and Erich von Stroheim. He even claimed credit for supposedly directing the film The Blue Angel (1930). Actually, Mesa was his only known film credit. The music of the film was composed by Hoyt Curtin. It makes use of a flamenco guitar and a piano, with their sounds combined in what seems to be a free jazz composition. It was later reused in the film Jail Bait (1954). The narrator Lyle Talbot also appeared in various films by Ed Wood, such as Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). One of the various spider-women of Aranya is played by Dolores Fuller, who also appeared in Wood's films. The film also features the film debut of Katina Vea as the spider-woman who first drove Masterson to the desert. She later became better known as a regular in Jerry Warren films, using the stage