How They Got the Bugs Out : Insects: When they needed spiders for ‘Arachnophobia,’ a species from New Zealand answered the casting call.

You can’t train spiders, Frank Marshall discovered, and he should know. As a second unit director working for Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis on movies like “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and “Back to the Future,” Marshall earned a reputation for his skill in pulling bravura performances from snakes and rats and dogs. Spiders proved to be another matter.

Marshall, who is making his directing debut on the new movie “Arachnophobia,” found that working spiders required special ingenuity and “extreme patience.” It also required a team of six spider “wranglers,” whose job it was to handle as many as 100 spiders at a time, coaxing them in and out of white plastic containers similar to those used to hold potato salad.

Starring Jeff Daniels as a kindly young doctor (suffering from a case of arachnophobia, the fear of spiders), John Goodman as a funny pest exterminator who’s seen too many Westerns and “Big Bob,” an eight-inch Amazonian bird-eating tarantula, “Arachnophobia” is a comedy-thriller in a Hitchcockian vein that begins with a shred of scientific fact and goes hurtling into the realm of dark fantasy where insects can be imagined to possess the malign tendencies of human beings.

Dropping into place as the last of the youth market summer movies and the least talked-about until now, “Arachnophobia,” made by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment in association with Disney’s new Hollywood Pictures division, will test not only America’s linguistic skills but also its squeamishness about eight-legged things that crawl in the night.

“It’s something that creates conversation, that gives it an edge,” says Marshall about the title. “One time we had the title ‘Along Came the Spider,’ and I thought that was too cute because there are people who like to go to the movies to be scared. I don’t know the answer to the question: Will people who are afraid of spiders go to the movie?”

Marshall is best known as a producer long associated with Spielberg, overseeing such films as the Indiana Jones trilogy and “The Color Purple,” as well as the infamous “Twilight Zone--The Movie.” But he also did second unit directing, specializing in scenes involving animals.

Five different kinds of spiders are seen in the movie; most of them are not the hairy-legged tarantulas familiar from creep shows and B movies like “Tarantula” (1955)and “Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo” (1977) but the relatively unfamiliar delena spider from New Zealand, chosen by the filmmakers during a “spider Olympics,” in which auditioning spiders “would have to do certain things,” says head spider-wrangler Steven Kutcher, a professional entomologist. “They had to walk up a wall, across a piece of string, climb into a glass.”

The delena is actually harmless and doesn’t bite (another reason it was chosen), but it does possess an oddly creepy feature in that two of its legs are longer than the others and wiggle eerily over the edges of tables, lampshades, and other camera-ready surfaces.

Kutcher, who took care of 3,000 African locusts in the “Exorcist II” and 40,000 carpenter ants in “Wonder Woman,” brings a special point of view to motion pictures: “The way I analyze movies is, how good were the bugs?”

“I was worried,” Marshall admits. “ ‘Is this little spider going to be scary?’ But I thought the spiders had to be real, unlike ‘Tarantula,’ where you see these big things lumbering along. When people know that a person can die from a spider bite, it’s the same as a shark coming up and biting their arm off.”

In a further comparison to “Jaws”--the movie that made his mentor famous--Marshall adds, “In ‘Jaws,’ you had to be in the water, but with a spider, it can be anywhere and attack you from anywhere.”

In “Arachnophobia” the delenas are supposed to be the malevolent offspring of a common garden variety spider and a deadly tree-dwelling tarantula from the darkest jungles of Venezuela that has found its way to a sleepy California town in the coffin of one of its victims, a member of an overreaching American scientific expedition.

Apparently furious over being smoked out of his prehistoric South American habitat, Big Bob takes his revenge by setting up a nest in Jeff Daniels’ barn.

The movie was conceived by Don Jakoby, a former candidate for an advanced degree in high-energy physics who chucked science for screenwriting more than a decade ago and has worked on such tall Hollywood tales as “Alien” and “Blue Thunder.”

“I was looking for something between ‘The Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ and ‘Alien,’ ” Jakoby says of the original script, “but (Disney) decided to go for the broadest audience. We started with a chilly, scary piece.”

While Jakoby holds the title of co-producer on “Arachnophobia,” a designation he likens to being “the illegitimate son of the king,” two other writers, Stephen Metcalfe and Wesley Strick, were brought in to write additional drafts, a common practice in Hollywood.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chairman of Walt Disney Studios, evidently thought enough of Jakoby’s first script to deliver it personally to Marshall last summer while Marshall was on location in rural Washington state making “Always” with Spielberg.

“The first script was more of a pure thriller,” Marshall says. “Disney wanted to put more humor into it, and I agreed. I thought it was important to diffuse the thrills and scariness of it.”

Some of the humor comes now from the character played by John Goodman, who provides a recurring sight gag just by showing up dressed in an exterminator’s outfit that appears designed for global chemical warfare.

Bodies do begin to pile up in the town as the spider menace spreads, but as Marshall notes, “the deaths are G-rated. I didn’t want it to be gory.”

While acknowledging a debt to Hitchcock and “The Birds” in particular, he nevertheless says he would like to think he has created “a new kind of thriller” that can be both truly suspenseful and amusing. Daniels, for example, manages to get a big laugh with a line about an expensive bottle of wine even as he is facing possible death.

“You had to be careful where you place the jokes,” Marshall says. “You can’t break up certain moments, others you could. Not until I put the whole movie together did I know how that was going to work.”

The special effects in “Arachnophobia” are mild by the standards of Spielberg’s fantasy factory. A webbing gun was devised to “spin” an enormous web in the barn. Mechanical replicas of the spiders were used about 10% of the time.

“When we couldn’t get the spider to do something,” the director says, “we would go to the mechanical spider.”

Designing ways to control the real spiders proved to be among the production’s most difficult challenges. “How do you get a spider to crawl into a shoe from a foot away?” asks Kutcher. “These are not things you have to do every day.”

The filmmakers learned they could guide the spiders down “lanes” formed by thin vibrating wires and back them up with Lemon Pledge (the spiders didn’t like the feel of the gooey surface under their eight feet).

During a climactic sequence in a basement, when Daniels faces a showdown with Big Bob, the large arachnid is shown crawling on parts of his body, paralyzing him with fear. “We did some mix and match,” Marshall says, referring to the three live tarantulas used and their mechanical doubles. “When it’s crawling up his leg, that’s a real spider, and when it’s facing off with him. There probably wasn’t a lot of acting going on in that scene.”

Daniels says the hardest part of working with the spiders was the tedium it involved. “It was difficult because sometimes we’d have to do 20 takes until the spider would do the right thing. I’d have to be great 20 times.”

Now that the film is being released, Marshall must put up with routine speculation as to the specific role played behind the scenes by Spielberg, whose executive producing duties on such films as “Poltergeist” were said to have included much of the directing, as well.

“He was always there,” Marshall says, “but fortunately I was able to handle everything myself. I showed him the first cut, and we talked about it and he made some suggestions. Some of them I did and some of them I didn’t do.”

“He was around,” says Daniels about Spielberg. “He would pop in once in a while. But it was Frank’s movie.”

Marshall stands to make his reputation as a director with this, his first movie behind the camera. But what is “Arachnophobia” going to do for the reputations of the world’s vast population of spiders?

Kutcher, who spends much of his time away from movie sets speaking to environmental groups and school kids “to alleviate their fears of insects,” admits he came to this latest assignment with a certain ambivalence.

“The movie is made for entertainment,” he says, making it clear that none of the known species of tarantulas are deadly to humans and that the alarming entomological implications of the movie are strictly fanciful.

“Why would a spider attack a person?” Kutcher reasons. “They only attack for food or for defense.”

Nor can they “think” like Big Bob, the scientist adds. “Spiders think about flies if they think about anything.”