Arachnophobia is being remade. Fuck.

I feel personally attacked.

I've just found out Arachnophobia is being remade.

The film that traumatised me as a young lad and caused me dozens of sleepless nights is coming back.

I will of course go and see it because I'm a masochistic idiot.

I was about eleven or so. My brother called me into the living room to see a spider climbing up the wall. I remember it being huge but it was probably no bigger than a stamp. We stood close to watch it. I put out my hand to shoo it up the wall and IT JUMPED ONTO MY ARM!

That was the start of it.

A few weeks later Arachnophobia hit the cinemas. The phobia hadn't fully taken hold of me yet so I was mad to see it. Back then films came out in America months before here so the telly was full of trailers for it and newspapers were full of articles about how scary it was. Young me was giddy so when it appeared in the two screen cinema in Roscrea I was over the moon. Myself and my brother got our pocket money and ran into town. Chocolate and taytos and score coke was bought and we settled into our seats. The lights went down. We shook with excitement and the film started.

And the fear. Oh sweet motherfuckin jesus, the fear.

Three scenes always spring to mind when I think of this film. The first was the discovery of the monster spider in South America. Researchers have set up smoke machines under a canopy of trees and the creatures above are dying and falling to the ground. It's mostly butterflies floating down but then a thump is heard. That put me on edge. A thump. The photographer along for the ride finds a massive spider on the ground, seemingly dead with it's long hairy legs all balled up. He leans in to take a picture and the spider leaps at him and grabs the lense of his camera. WE ROARED. I remember it made me angry. I didn't enjoy it. I knew I was not going to enjoy this at all. 

The film progressed and I was more and more on edge. The spider has hitched a lift back in a coffin and begins to infest a small Californian town after mating with a house spider. The place is slowly over run. But not by big spiders, by little ones, little ones like the ones we had in Ireland. Oh god, these could be Irish house spiders. Weep. Our heroes are running all over town searching for the cause of the infection. They need the coroner to help. They get to his house. It's too late though. Him and his wife are dead. We see a close up of the coroner's face just as a spider climbs out of his nose. I died a little too during this scene. I was in hell. Squirming in my seat. It couldn't get worse could it.......

The hero gets back to his house. The town is fucked and he just wants his family out. he runs into warn them and finds them watching TV. Then the above picture happens. The spiders begin to swarm. 1000's of them. It was just petrifying. I mean it was ridiculous but I was 11. NOPE. I stood up, turned to my brother, said sorry and walked out. I could not cope. N'able.

3 years later I saw the ending and it was everything i feared it would be. I was in the scouts and we were away at camp in the arse end of Tipperary. It was a rainy summer and we ended up in a hall somewhere to watch a film. The film was of course a VHS copy of Arachnophobia. My stomach lurched. I knew there was no escaping this. I was in a room with a group of young lads who would torture me if they found out how afraid I was. The film went on and was as scary if not scarier than the first time I'd seen it. The crowd of scouts was loving it apart from the lone trembling wreck in the middle. The ending arrived. I wanted to run but I knew I'd never hear the end of it if I did. It was predictably the stuff of nightmares. There was not a ounce of sleep got in the tent that night. 

Now it's being remade by James Wan who made the pretty damn effective Conjuring series of movies and the fantastically entertaining Fast & Furious 7. I will be uncontrollably drawn to it by some sort of self destructive streak.

I know this bastard of a film will break me.