Films: Arachnophobia (1990)

Alias: The General, his mate, the babies

Type: Natural

Location: Jungle/Haunted Home/Civilized Area

Height/Weight: That of an average tarantula.

Affiliation: Neutral

Summary: For some, nothing is more scary than the spider. An eight-legged potentially dangerous arthropod that moves too ominously and only gets worse with size. Now imagine the worst spider you can think of...and immediately cast it to the side for this one.

History: An ultra-rare breed of spider from Venezuela, this little beastie accidentally hitched a ride on a coffin before being escorted to a small town in California. Soon, it mated with a local house spider, and spawned countless young. Keep in mind that this spider, called the General, had an incredibly venomous bite, as did all of his children. And they're spreading.

Notable Kills: One baby bites a jock right in the middle of a football game.

Final Fate: Pretty much all of the young are stomped and killed, queen included, while the General ends up fighting with his upstairs neighbor, who ironically fears spiders greatly. After getting kicked and set on fire, the General is shot with a nail gun, and comes hurdling at the nest like a fireball, ending the potential spider invasion.

Powers/Abilities: The bites contain a highly dangerous poison that kills people within seconds.

Weakness: Anything conventional.

Scariness Factor: 4.5-The General is big and would give any arachnophobe a heart attack, but the true fear should come from the babies. They are super small, and yet their venom is great enough to kill a person before anything can be done. There is almost no other poison out there that is so instantaneously lethal like that.

Trivia: -The babies in this film were portrayed by harmless New Zealand Avondale spiders, while the General was played by both an animatronic made by eventual "Mythbusters" guy Jamie Hyneman, and a goliath bird eater named Big Bob after Robert Zemeckis. Bob, like most bird eaters, was rather aggressive, and required lots of direction. He was also given a prosthetic abdomen to look even bigger. And above all of this, it was required throughout filming that no spider get harmed, so they took some interesting measures (for instance, John Goodman's shoe was hollow enough for the ostensibly squished baby to curl up and wait).

-The most venomous spider in the whole world is not any tarantula. Their bites are usually no worse than a bee sting. That dubious honor would go to the Australian Sydney Funnel-Web, which is fairly large by spider standards, and used to be a major killer before antivenoms were invented. Afterwards, almost no one has died at their fangs.