'The thing about Kingdom of the Spiders, the tarantulas were real!' William Shatner recalls tough shoot on cult classic horror

William Shatner says one of his toughest ever shoots was on the 1977 film 'Kingdom of the Spiders’ because he had to be covered in real tarantulas.

The 93-year-old Hollywood legend starred as veterinarian Dr. Robert ‘Rack’ Hansen in the science-fiction horror flick set in rural Verde Valley, Arizona, overrun by killer tarantulas.

Shatner's co-stars Woody Strode and Tiffany Bolling played local farmer Walter Colby and archaeologist Diane Ashley, respectively. Walter becomes frightened when his farm animals are killed by an unknown creature and after he and Hansen send off a sample to a university laboratory arachnologist Dr. Hansen arrives to inform Walter that his animals were killed by spider venom, much to the astonishment of everyone. The discovery of the killer spiders has fatal consequences for the town.

To film the scenes with the tarantulas, director John 'Bud' Cardos did not use prop spiders and instead arranged for 5,000 live tarantulas to be purchased for the shoot, spending nearly 10 per cent of the $500,000 budget on arachnids.

'Star trek' actor Shatner has recalled that working with the tarantulas was as horrific as the scenes seen on screen because the eight-legged beasts would shed their urticating hairs leaving him and his castmates itching all over.

In an appearance on 'The Drew Lane Show', Shatner said: "The thing about ‘Kingdom of the Spiders’, in that, the spiders, they were tarantulas, were real! They didn’t have little flippy floppers.

“From time-to-time, on screen, they would dump a big bag of tarantulas over my head. And not only are there little sharp claws, which allows them to scramble up everything, but the hairs on their bodies are used for itching powder. So, the debris they would dump on my head was ugly.”

Other problems with the tarantulas on set included them refusing to run towards their "victims", due to them being nervous of humans, and, because the species are cannibals, each one of the 5,000 spiders required its own individual container.

Shatner - who is famous all over the world for his portrayal of Captain James T. Kirk in the original 1960s 'Star Trek' TV series and subsequent films, such as 'Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan' - previously revealed he was also bitten by his creepy crawly co-stars.

Talking about 'Kingdom of the Spiders' for a Shout! Factory TV Original, he said: "One is hard-wired to be afraid of creepy crawly things. Once I learned that the sting is, it hurts, but it's more like a bee sting, the bite of a tarantula isn't that bad."