By Steve Newton
I’ve got an intense fear of spiders.
Not small ones–or even bigger ones as long as they’re of the “daddylonglegs” variety.
No, it’s the dark, hairy, menacing ones, the ones we used to call “wolf spiders”, that would hang out in our Chilliwack basement when I was a kid.
“They’re a lot more afraid of you than you are of them,” my brave mom used to say before she’d come into my bedroom with a rolled up Better Homes and Gardens and lower the boom.
“Wanna bet?” I’d be thinking, most of the time.
Once in a while I have dreams/nightmares involving spiders, usually a whole bunch of the eight-legged freaks. Quite often the setting is that old wood-panelled basement bedroom, and the theme is getting the fvck out of there without stepping on any of them in my bare feet.
Just last night I had a pretty weird spider dream. I was living in a rundown house somewhere and I walked into a huge empty room and saw something in one corner that looked like a bunch of dust or debris flying up into the air from the floor. It was a steady stream of something being blown into the room, and when I got closer I realized it was spiders, ranging in size from tiny to just big enough to freak me out.
That’s about all I remember before waking up and realizing, hell yeah, it’s Saturday morning and there is no rain of spiders. But the weird thing is that, minutes later while sipping coffee and checking my Twitter feed, I came across an image that sent me right back into creepy-crawlie nightmare land.
It was the poster for the upcoming sixth season of American Horror Story, and it showed two black spiders emerging from beneath a woman’s closed eyelids. It took me back to that time I first saw the inside of Alice Cooper‘s incredible Love it To Death album…
….but it was way worse. These were real-looking spiders, not just makeup.
I’ve never actually seen an episode of American Horror Story–although I’ve heard good things about it–but I gotta say that this particular ad campaign made me look. Might have to check it out now when the new season premieres September 14 on the FX channel.
And to all my fellow arachnophobes out there who never really wanted to see two black spiders emerging from beneath a woman’s closed eyelids, sorry about that.
May you can “unsee” it.