Arachnid Anthologies: Tarantula Meets The Twilight Zone

As part of my recent Christmas gift haul, I got the Blu-ray release of Tarantula (1955), Jack Arnold's entry into the "big bug" subgenre of horror/sci-fi movies that was popular during the '50s. The Blu-ray was released by Shout! Factory and the extras are sparse, but the 2K scan of the original print and Tom Weaver's audio commentary make the purchase worthwhile if you're a classic creature feature buff like me. However, this post isn't about the Blu-ray--it's about Tarantula itself, where it came from and where it crawled off to after it left the silver screen.

The screenplay for Tarantula was written by Robert M. Fresco as a revision of another script Fresco wrote for a 1955 episode of Science Fiction Theatre, a science fiction anthology series. The episode was called "No Food for Thought" and it was also directed by Jack Arnold (you can watch the episode on YouTube here). According to Fresco, Arnold liked the script so much that he wanted Fresco to re-work it into a feature length film, the film that would be Tarantula.

The general premise behind "No Food for Thought" and Tarantula is the same: scientists working on a new kind of nutrient that can help prevent starvation among expanding human populations. However, where the experimental food in the TV episode results in a deadly virus, the experimental food in Tarantula causes organisms to mutate and enlarge in unexpected ways.

Maybe Soylent Green isn't so bad after all.

Fast forward thirty years later to 1985. CBS revives another science fiction anthology series, Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. During its first season, the revived series airs a segment called "The Elevator", which was written by noted author Ray Bradbury. Running at around ten minutes, this segment features two brothers who are looking for their missing father at a closed factory he owned. As the segment progresses, the brothers discuss their father's research: a new kind of food to end world hunger, a food that causes its consumers to grow to unusual sizes. You can watch this segment on YouTube here.

I don't know if Bradbury was ever interviewed about "The Elevator" and what inspired him to write it, but Jack Arnold fans can see how much it parallels the plot and ideas of Tarantula. I saw "The Elevator" when it first aired on CBS and it freaked me out; however, I hadn't seen Tarantula yet and didn't understand Jack Arnold's career and his impact on horror and sci-fi movies, so the significance of the segment's details was lost on me. 

Bradbury worked with Arnold on It Came from Outer Space (1953), the author's first film treatment that was adapted into a movie, so I wonder if "The Elevator" was Bradbury's tribute to Arnold and his film Tarantula. Then again, I've read in a few articles that Arnold and John Landis pitched a 3D remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon to Universal in the early '80s, but the studio turned it down to produce Jaws 3D instead. For all I know, maybe Arnold spoke to Bradbury about doing a remake of Tarantula, and what we see in "The Elevator" was as far as this idea got. I can't prove any of this, but it is fun to speculate. Regardless, here's an augmented reality 3D model I did of the Tarantula poster: 

I created a QR code for my Tarantula poster 3D model. Just download Adobe Aero onto your smartphone or tablet, and then find a flat vertical surface where you can place the model.