as the jet squadron leader. Production Tarantula! takes place in the fictional town of Desert Rock, Arizona. The film's special effects, which depict giant animals and insects, were advanced for the mid-1950s. Real animals, including a rabbit and a guinea pig in Professor Deemer's lab, were used to represent their giant on-screen counterparts. A live tarantula was used whenever the gigantic spider is seen moving. Shooting of miniatures was reserved for close-ups of its face and fangs and for the final scenes of the giant spider being set ablaze by the jet squadron's napalm attack. The resulting scenes proved more convincing in some ways, than the giant prop ants used in the earlier Warner Bros. film Them! (1954). Of this and the entire film, Jack Arnold said about Tarantula!: "We decided to do this film because, generally, people are very afraid of spiders". Although set in Arizona, Tarantula! was filmed entirely in California, with the desert scenes being shot in Apple Valley. Additional footage was shot in and around the rock formations of Dead Man's Point in Lucerne Valley, California, a frequently used location for many early Western films. Like Them!, Tarantula! makes atmospheric use of its desert locations. While a radioactive isotope does make an appearance, it differs from most other 1950s big-bug features in having the mutation caused by the peaceful research of a well-intentioned scientist, rather than by nuclear weapons and/or a mad genius. Director Jack Arnold used matte effects once again two years later to show miniaturization, rather than gigantism, in The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), which also featured an encounter with a spider. The film's theatrical release poster, featuring a spider with two eyes instead of the normal eight, and carrying a woman in its fangs, does not represent any scene in the final film; all the spider's human victims are male. This gaudy depiction of a woman-in-peril had become, by this time, a standard B-movie poster cliché that continued being used for some years, to promote similar films. Reception The film was often paired with Running Wild as part of a double feature. It was the fourth-biggest film at the U.S. box office in December 1955 and earned rentals of $1.1 million. Film critic Leonard Maltin awarded the film 3 out of 4 stars, praising the film's fast pacing, special effects, and intriguing subplot. He called it, "One of the best giant-insect films". The