Horrors of Spider Island was written and directed by Fritz Böttger, a German writer and director whose primary focus was in writing for film and television, mainly from 1950 to 1970. In the late 1930s, Fritz got his start in acting and choreography. Choreography, aha! Could this be where the impetus of the dancing troupe element of Spider Island comes from? Fritz directed two films in 1953 – Die Junggesellenfalle (The Bachelor Trap) and Auf der Grüne Wiese (On the Green Meadow). Seven years later they decided to pick up the director’s cap once more for Ein Toter hing im Netz (A Corpse Hung in the Web). The film was initially released in the US with the title It’s Hot in Paradise, then eventually was rereleased as a double feature with The Flesh and the Fiends with its now official title of Horrors of Spider Island. After Ein Toter hing im Netz, Fritz never directed a film again, but did have a good ten years of writing left in him.

One of the film’s producers was Wolf C. Hartwig, who went on to produce Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron and its sequel Breakthrough, which was directed by one of my favorite action filmmakers Andrew V. MacLagen. Wolf produced exploitation aplenty, oh did he. Their first feature film was a controversy stirring documentary Bis fünf nach zwölf – Adolf Hitler und das 3. Reich – I mean, the dude’s taking on Hitler with his first go-round, it doesn’t get much more exploitative than that. Post Spider Island, Wolf went on to sex films, and created what is referred to as the “Sex Report” film, which are those pseudo-documentary movies with sexual subject matters. Wolf’s series was titled Schulmädchen-Report (Schoolgirl Report). Hitler, spiders, schoolgirls… A real producer.

The cinematography of Horrors of Spider Island was helmed by Georg Krause, who a mere few years prior to Spider Island was the DP of none other than Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory – literally one of the most beautifully shot films of all time, and this guy’s framing up Alexander D’Arcy in his three-toothed spider make-up. Insane. According to IMDB, Krause’s earliest director of photography credit was from 1923 (a film titled Downfall) and his last was in 1967 (a couple episodes of a TV series Das Kriminalmuseum).

I present this information of the major parts of the crew to you with the hopes of gleaning some sense of context to how this movie came into existence because – believe it or not – there doesn’t exist much writing about the making of Horrors of Spider Island. These weren’t just some guys fooling around with a movie camera. These were established craftsmen of their time and industry.

Low budget films, regional filmmaking, genre films, exploitation movies, all of these words can be used to attempt to categorize these journeyed works. We’re talking about movies that would get chopped up, scenes tossed aside, new music cues added in, and a new title given every time it played a different theatrical run – that’s right, the filmmakers of Horrors of Spider Island did not refer to this movie as Horrors of Spider Island.

The aforementioned words of “regional” and “genre” have had an Oscar-worthy comeback in recent years. They’ve become clinical and respectable words that effectively group and provide context for what would be otherwise completely rogue, unexplainable films. Distributors and physical media companies like Severin and Vinegar Syndrome have seemingly cracked the code on boutique presentations of both unknown films that have never seen the light of day, or movies that have been seen for years but are in desperate need of a new restoration like Horrors of Spider Island, which years ago would most likely be found in a slim DVD case in a bargain bin at a gas station and the only word used to describe it would be “trash”.

Or you could watch it dubbed over by Mystery Science Theater 3000. Growing up in Illinois, our local station horror host was a guy named Svengoolie (“Berwyn?!”) and in contrast to MST3K, Svengoolie would minimally dub over the films, maybe include a couple bits at his studio bookending the commercial breaks, but for the most part he wouldn’t make fun of the films that much, which I always respected because as a kid I legitimately wanted to watch these films – kaiju films, Roger Corman films, Hammer films, and that sweet, sweet public domain goodness. It never made sense to me to make fun of movies that were already hilarious enough on their own or were actually downright good movies that got a bad rap – what MST3K does is almost like beating someone while they’re down.