Cambria: the California village that’s Mecca for horror fans
Cambria might be the Latin version of Cymru, but there are few places in the world that you’d mistake for Wales, less than the California coastal town that it (technically) shares a name with. Baking hot all year around, lined with skyscraping Monterey pines and breathtaking views everywhere you look, calling Cambria, California, idyllic is selling the whole place short.
It’s the kind of place that you could imagine arriving at for a weekend getaway and then never leaving. Setting down your bags, looking around at the complete absence of the hustle and bustle of city life and thinking, “Oh, right, I actually don’t have to go back to sweating myself to death on a subway, I could just stay here and- wait, why is that man wearing a baseball cap with eight legs?”
Yeah, so, small caveat here. It turns out that Cambria, California, hasn’t gone unnoticed in its time. Which, y’know, why shouldn’t it? It’s one of the vanishingly few places you can genuinely escape from the modern world in, and those are places to be cherished. It even votes blue, which, even in the Dem stronghold of California, is kind of a miracle for somewhere so out of the way. However, it is a place in California, and thus it has been featured in the movies.
A few of the action scenes in the Arnie action classic Commando were filmed there. The video for Lady Gaga’s ‘GUY’ was filmed in nearby Hearst Castle, but one picture made the town famous. One that traded on just how remote and beautiful the town was, while giving its lead a single, tiny problem that all of us could relate to. One that could even make us think twice about relocating to a place like Cambria.
That picture is 1990’s Arachnophobia, which was shot almost entirely in Cambria.
How did Arachnophobia make Cambria famous?
The movie’s director, the legendary Frank Marshall, talked about why he chose Cambria, saying, “I wanted an idyllic Norman Rockwell town, a little town where nothing ever happens. There’s a cute little Main Street and a high school, and a place we could build a house, we made the whole movie there. It was perfect; the nature, the beauty – charming and idyllic.” Though it was renamed Canaima for the film, Cambria became nothing less than a character in its own right.
As filming progressed, several local people became featured extras in the film, from its postmaster to its goldsmith, all the way to its high school football team, the Coast Union High School Broncos. All of which helps to give the picture its unmistakable atmosphere, and make it more than just a well-made creature feature – the film was a decent box office hit on release, but the signs were always there that this was going to be a cult classic.
What else can you call a comedy-horror film in which Jeff Daniels battles a spider with an absolutely horrific attitude?… It’s not even a giant, radioactive one or anything like that, it’s just a spider, which makes it so much worse, a lot of people liked this film, but the people who loved it, really, really loved it, so much so that 35 years after the release of Arachnophobia, a decent chunk of its tourism dollars are made catering to fans of the picture who come to see the town.
One can only hope that the locals can put up with all the spiders.