So about those
'Horrors of Spider Island'…
by Weltraumbesty / KRP, 10th of January 2026
///
There's a curious bit of film industry gossip buried in a back issue of the Sydney Morning Herald, dated 6th of December 1959. Just a few dozen words split across two columns, it reads as follows:
A "BACK-PEDALLING" American producer named John Harris has been touting stills from his latest film, "Horror on Spider Island," around Britain.
They show scantily-clad girls cavorting around a man tied to a stake.
Asked where it was filmed, Harris snorted: "Where? We haven't started yet. We make the stills first. Then we use the stills to get the money to make the film. Much easier than writing a script first."
An earlier blurb, related by columnist Sheilah Graham and syndicated in Utah's Deseret News on September 10th of the same year, confuses and clarifies simultaneously, reporting a more ungainly working title (Horrors on the Island of Scorpions) even as it relates a rather familiar storyline:
Producer John Harris' "Horrors on the Island of Scorpions" is about eight girls on a deserted island with one man who turns into a spider. He eats up one or maybe two of the girls. The picture is being made in Yugoslavia.
Though the gossip items related above doubtless refer to the film that would eventually come to be known as Horrors of Spider Island, the John Harris in question is a mystery… to this writer, at least. The production he appears to have been hawking so diligently in those final weeks of the '50s would go on to be made — by West Germans — and released in a number of versions worldwide, none of which credit Harris in any capacity. And though the working titles he pitched now hew closest to that by which the film is most readily known, it took a mid-60s drive-in reissue (and one clumsily inserted title optical) to get it there. Originally issued domestically as Ein Toter hing im Netz in the Spring of 1960, the film crept its way to adults-only audiences Stateside via presenter Gaston Hakim (himself a gossip column regular at the time) and distributor Pacemaker Pictures as It's Hot in Paradise two years later. Horrors, in a revised and retitled nudity-free edition, would infest drive-in multi-bills from 1965 until the middle of the 1970s alongside a slew of other Pacemaker imports.
Harris and his island of spiders (or scorpions, as it were) is a curious footnote to a production replete with curious footnotes, a selfsame monster horror and sexploitation oddity that takes time out for a ballet demonstration, confuses Los Angeles for New York City and was somehow photographed by the credited cinematographer of Paths of Glory. The mind boggles at the weird facts of the thing even as it suspects the one most obvious — that Horrors of Spider Island under any title is often a film better talked about than seen.
After a full interminable reel of character introductions, in which prospective showgirls are judged one at a time by rectangular and mustachioed promoter Gary Webster, Horrors follows Graham's gossip-tuned synopsis more or less to a tee, wrecking its gaggle of increasingly under-dressed performers on a deserted paradise plagued by a giant irradiated spider. Gary is bitten and turns into my favorite kind of monster — a monster in trousers — and, between soft-core cat fights and a protracted bit of topless burlesque, goes on a brief murderous rampage. Two girls are eaten. A couple of guys show up to do science, but mostly just lech around. Gary murders one of them as well, breaks down a door, then gets sad and sinks himself in quicksand. It may not be much of a story, but I'm afraid it'll have to do.
Horrors of Spider Island maintains some minor historical import in and of itself, being one of the earliest films of its genre to be made in West Germany following the war (and in keeping with the trend towards European-made horror that was developing around the same time, best exemplified by the turn of the decade works of Italian directors Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava). In practice Horrors feels less of a piece with the other Euro-horrors of the period (even its immediate West German predecessor, The Head) than it does some strange antecedent to the The Monster of Camp Sunshine. If Doris Wishman had been a tag along for Roger Corman's Puerto Rico cycle it might have turned out something like this. Already successful upon its initial domestic release (a benefit of being one of the first to the picking) Horrors proved endlessly exploitable abroad courtesy of its boozy mix of cheesecake sex appeal and sci-fi monster antics, a combination that kept the picture in circulation well beyond any anticipated shelf life (and, following a home video revival in the '90s, has kept it in cult circulation into the present). That's not to suggest that any of it really works in a critical sense — it doesn't — but as a pure exploitation product, produced on the cheap and ripe for repeat profit, Horrors positively excelled.
Credited writer and director Fritz Böttger entered the industry as a choreographer in the '30s and transitioned to acting during the wartime years, then pivoted to screenwriting for the decades thereafter. Horrors of Spider Island was the last of only three productions he would direct, and his first work in that capacity since 1953. One suspects that he was a bit in over his head for Horrors which, in addition to his writing duties, had him threading the needle between both a substantial location shoot in former Yugoslavia and a more traditional studio production in Munich. The latter fares relatively well in a visual sense, especially where the monster is concerned. Gary the Were-spider is treated to a number of starkly lit, moody close-ups, and likewise the adorable horrible puppet that spells his doom. The location work is more of a mixed bag, and too frequently descends into a listless run and gun style that belies both the brevity of production and the paucity of its writing. I can't help but have some pity for editor Heidi Genée (ne Rente, working her first feature), who must have been scrambling to hold Horrors together despite the best efforts of Böttger's sleepy survival melodramatics and significant lapses in location coverage. Still, she succeeds in spinning strange gold of the thing on more than one occasion. The finale, in which Gary the depressed Were-spider is hounded through a forest towards his untimely demise by a flare-bearing mob of ill-dressed and vengeful showgirls, is glorious. It's like Der Heilige Berg, but by way of Benny Hill… pure absurd art.
Böttger's sexploitative sensibilities remain curiously varied, ranging from a choreographed topless burlesque and some inane nudie-cutie skinny dipping to the film's other exploitative high point — a comparatively charged, surprisingly rough fight between co-stars Eva Schauland (a model and nightclub dancer with few other film appearances) and the notable Barbara Valentin (of Fassbinder's World on a Wire), whose stacked physique and fuck-off attitude remain Horrors' most bankable assets. Even in its cut version, sans a shot of Valentin's violent disrobing, the scene's more suggestive qualities persist… the two women straddling one another on a bed and, eventually, the floor while a third watches in close-up, biting her thumb with sensual interest. It's a hell of a thing, and more provocative by miles than one might expect of a film that otherwise feels so harmless.
While there is undeniably some there there, there's just not enough of it to keep Horrors of Spider Island afloat for even its relatively brief running time — 84 minutes in its longest cut, and significantly shorter in its Stateside iterations. Much of that is down to Böttger's indifferent scripting and inconsistent direction, both of which leave the film stranded in the long, plentiful stretches between its more noteworthy happenings. Gary counts cans. Dancers bicker over shirts and chores. Barbara Valentin takes a suggestive, decidedly PG shower. It's not an entirely incompetent effort by any means, with some motion towards characterization of both the largely interchangeable cast of dancers and of the film's protagonist-cum-antagonist (who gathers a little bug-man pathos along the way), but man does it drag…
That's a minor quibble at best, however, and more than half a century beyond any real relevance. It's no great contribution to cultural philosophy to suggest Horrors of Spider Island isn't very good, a fact that's been self evident from the time it was new, and one doubts anyone involved in the production much cared. They knew what they were making after all, so why would they? Producer Wolf C. Hartwig, who took his dubious Horrors to the bank and never looked back, certainly didn't. The unqualified success of the effort ushered him and his production company Rapid Film on to bigger, if not always better things. After a run of profitable international co-productions Hartwig would strike soft-core gold with 1970's Schulmädchen-Report, a blockbuster sexploitation mockumentary that begat the prolific and widely distributed series for which he is best known. Ten (of an eventual thirteen) were in distribution at the time Hartwig co-financed what is perhaps his most prestigious work, Sam Peckinpah's critically divisive Cross of Iron.
Even though Horrors of Spider Island feels roughly as cheap as it does terrible, few who involved themselves with it appear to have been any worse off for the experience. Fritz Böttger may have quit directing, but he continued writing for film and television through the end of the 1960s, while Heidi Genée found plentiful editorial work, much of it in collaboration with filmmaking brothers Peter and Ulrich Schamoni, before becoming a director herself in the latter '70s. Barbara Valentin, also-ran of Ein Toter hing im Netz and top-billed star of It's Hot in Paradise, would grow from a sixties bombshell into one of the faces of the New German Cinema. She would continue working in film and television through the turn of the millennium, forty full years from her tussle on Spider Island. For erstwhile star Alexander D'Arcy (Spider-Gary himself) the film must have felt like a bizarre footnote to an increasingly strange career — D'Arcy's filmography must be seen to be believed, with the actor taking turns in everything from golden age studio hits Another Thin Man and How to Marry a Millionaire to Russ Meyer's Fanny Hill and Al Adamson's Blood of Dracula's Castle.
As for the film, Horrors of Spider Island has survived well enough despite itself. Though it seems to have vanished for a time following the end of its decade long residency at the drive-in (it was no longer playing television by the time I was growing up, and after spying Spider-Gary's make-up in a monster book from the library I was definitely on the look-out for it) a home video revival wasn't far behind. The '90s put fresh eyes to the saucy and spendthrift Horrors courtesy of gray market wunderkinds like Sinister Cinema and the inimitable Something Weird Video, and in 1999 the film made it to Mystery Science Theater 3000, cat-fight and all. Present day perverts connoisseurs can find it in a tasty 2020 blu-ray edition from Severin Films, served up in both its uncut German and brisker It's Hot in Paradise versions. What a fuckin' world.
///
~ Weltraumbesty / KRP
← previous // home ↵ // next →
if you enjoyed this shit then please consider throwing us a buck or two. we wander the wastes of intergalactic space in search of a new home, free from war and traffic accidents, and are powered by coffee alone. thank you.
© Weltraumbesty