You’d Watch This Movie: Spiderman as Body Horror

They should do another Spiderman reboot, once more starting at the beginning and rehashing the same fucking origin story yet again.

But this time there should be an intense focus on young Peter Parker’s extreme arachnophobia.

After he becomes Spiderman, the phobia forms the backbone of a growing neurosis of self loathing and deep, emotional conflict in the dark depths of Parker’s soul.

He becomes increasingly unstable, frightening three shades of hell out of Gwen Stacy until she flees from their apartment and files a restraining order. Spiderman then drops in on Stacy’s father and intimidates him and then humiliates him using his spiderpowers.

Captain George Stacy turns to his friend Norman Osborn, head of Oscorp – a company Stacy has helped secure contracts with the police to supply high-tech weaponry and body armor. Norman’s son has an enormous crush on Gwen and his father sends him to protect her and her father from Spiderman, secretly injecting him with an experimental serum.

Spidey and the unintentional Goblin are just about to fight it out when the increasingly unstable Parker gets distracted by Gwen’s erstwhile friend and fierce social competitor Mary Jane. Spiderman kidnaps Mary Jane and bears her away to his secret, webby hideout somewhere cinematically inexplicable like the Statue of Liberty’s crown or the underside of the Brooklyn Bridge. That would be fun, webs all over the support struts and whathaveyou, Mary Jane webbed in and hanging there staring straight down at the river, and an unmasked Spiderman hanging upside down beside her.

Gwen Stacy convinces the Goblin to rescue MJ, and when he arrives Harry Osborn realizes Spiderman is his old friend Peter Parker, a fact his father and George Stacy neglected to tell him. Harry is appalled at what has happened to Peter.

Peter Parker confesses to Harry Osborn that he believes the demonic king of all spiders bore him a special hatred, and so sent his influence into the spider that bit Peter. Its venom has infected his blood and he is slowly becoming transformed into a giant human spider. Peter weeps as he explains that he believes once his physical transformation is complete, the demon will erase his mind and inhabit his form in order to walk the earth and wreak havoc and terror on the “two-legs.”

Harry reasons that Peter Parker has lost his fucking marbles for sure, but before he can act to get his friend psychiatric help Spiderman attacks him. Surprised, the Goblin is unsuccessful at defending himself and falls into the water far below – apparently dead.

Spidey takes MJ and webs away.

Norman Osborn is enraged by the disappearance of his only son, and injects himself with the serum. George Stacy thinks maybe things have gone too far and they should get proper help from the authorities. The serumed-up Osborn Senior turns on him and fucking eats him alive.

Harry Osborn has survived, though, and after he drags himself out of the river he investigates the sad fate of his old friend Peter. He discovers Oscorp’s crazy spider research project and learns that his father’s gnomish scientists have created the serum used on him from spiderstuff. 

Harry is 100% creeped out by the idea that Peter’s delusions are anchored, even so tenuously as this, to reality. These experiments have to be stopped, even if there is no spider demon. Look what Oscorp has done to Peter, who was bitten by an experiment spider while touring the less secretive portions of the lab to write that article for the college newspaper.

Meanwhile, Peter’s transformation is in fact progressing and he’s getting ugly. Mary Jane is able to escape, barely. She runs, terrified and weeping, into a police station. She soon finds herself being grilled by detectives over her connection to the horrific murder of Captain George Stacy.

Chasing after MJ in a maddened psychosis, Spiderman webs into the city only to be intercepted by Norman Osborn, now Goblin Sr. Osborn is himself grossly transformed and quite literally looks like a goblin, or probably a vicious-ass Orc. With an axe and everything. Peter loses his mask and much of his costume in the fierce battle, and gradually revealed is his own deformed mutation. Peter has become hairy and four extra, vestigial appendages are growing from his abdomen, and in the battle’s climax he reveals that he can now shoot webs from his asshole.

The Goblin is webbed up to the side of the Empire State Building and Spiderman’s four extra legs fully extend and the Spiderman clings to the building and menaces his trapped opponnent. Peter’s mouth is dominated by two elongated fangs as he leans in for the kill.

But before the Spiderman can kill the Goblin, Harry Osborn arrives in his high-tech Goblin body armor. The contrast between the robotic-looking, body-armored Goblin and his literal Goblin father will be rich!

But now the battle continues, with Harry pleading with Spiderman to see reason. He – Harry – has discovered a way to reverse Peter’s mutations as well as Norman’s. The Spiderman attacks Harry and as the two battle, Goblinorman watches and has a moment like when Darth Vader watched the Emperor electrocuting Luke. He struggles against the webs but cannot break free. 

Gwen Stacy gets Mary Jane away from the cops. The detectives know her and, though they joke about her playing cops, they let her take MJ away. The two race to the scene of the battle and – as the conflict rages high over the New York streets, the two manage to free the Goblin.

Goblin jumps into the fray – but against his son. He loves his powers, and will not be forced to give them up!

Peter Parker has a moment of clarity and struggles to fight against his “spider-demon” – which will somewhere be explained as his subconscious method of thinking about his own dementia. He recognizes his friend, Harry, and turns on the Goblin. 

The battle devolves into a terrible free for all. The police arrive, equipped with their scary high tech Oscorp weaponry, and start shooting the place up. Guns, machine guns, helicopters and missiles and grenades and fucking ray guns if you like.

All three main characters are gravely wounded. The Spiderman is fatally wounded and as he slips away his body begins shifting back to its original, human form. Wounded Harry and dying Peter are in the middle of a heartfelt goodbye scene when the meterorite smashes into the ground right next to them. A titanic explosion hurls them high into the air.

The Goblin is incinerated in the blast. Harry is thrown away, shielded somewhat from the blast by Peter’s body. There is no sign of Peter afterwards.

The last shot focuses on the meterorite crater and the viscous, oily black thing snaking its way out of the cracked rock of the meteorite and towards the crushed body almost completely hidden in the rubble…

Roll credits to fiercely intense movie techno theme song.