$3 for 3 months. Save 90%.
$3 for 3 months. Save 90%.

'Giant Spider' director on why he loves Trump

Bill Rebane, director of "The Giant Spider Invasion," says Trump is just what U.S. needs.

Robert Mentzer
Movie poster for "The Giant Spider Invasion."

Maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that the guy whose most famous film is about an invasion of alien outsiders taking over rural America is a big Donald Trump supporter.

Every horror movie plays on one deep-seated anxiety or another. In Bill Rebane's low-budget 1975 film "The Giant Spider Invasion," it was the notion that a random, outside event — a meteor strike in northern Wisconsin, in the film — could bring about massive, uncontrollable changes that disrupt and threaten our lives. "The Giant Spider Invasion" would become a camp classic, and the awkward movements of its puppet spiders would land it on lists of all-time best bad movies, still popular among B-movie fans and still revived occasionally at festivals.

Rebane, now 79, lives in the small Iron County town of Saxon. He hasn't made films in a long time, but he writes books and scripts, and he keeps up a blog at his website, That is where, I learned when I happened to stumble upon the site last week, he has been speaking out about his gratitude for the political candidacy of Donald Trump.

Trump "may blunder and say stupid things," Rebane wrote, "but it’s right from the gut without script or TelePrompTer. He is a dyed-in-wool American and speaks with passion about America and and what America needs most."

"I’m a gut feeling guy, really," Rebane told me when I reached him by phone. Voters, he said, want to "tell the system, whoever the system involves, something many Americans are trying to get out of their system, their physical system. ... I think Washington is corrupt and our justice system is corrupt."

Bill Rebane in 1987.

Rebane himself ran independent campaigns for governor of Wisconsin twice, first in 1979 and again in 2002. In 2002, he told the Ashland Daily Press that his platform was based on his being a non-politician, a businessman, someone who could represent the people rather than a self-styled political professional. ("Do you know why the state is running a deficit?" he asked. "Neither do I.") He did not win, and said he really did not want to win.

That campaign, he reflected in our interview, came "much too early for people to accept non-politicians, people coming out of left field much as Trump did."

There's an echo of Trump, too, in some of Rebane's pronouncements on his own career. The Wausau premiere of his first feature film, 1973's "Invasion from Inner Earth," was "probably one of the biggest events ever in Wausau," he said. "Huge banners across all the major streets downtown, with thousands of people."

Here we should note that Rebane, a native of Latvia who retains a trace of a European accent, pronounces "huge" in the traditional way, not the Trumpian "yuuuge."

Meanwhile, he says "The Giant Spider Invasion" "has become the most pirated picture in the history of filmmaking."

Rebane's studio, The Shooting Ranch in rural Gleason, was the first ever, and for a long time the only, full-time feature film studio in the Midwest. He directed nine feature-length movies between 1973 and 1987, and led a movement in the 1980s to try to get Wisconsin's state government to put resources into attracting more movie business to the state. The Shooting Ranch was shuttered in 1988, and he carries bitterness toward the "idiot lawyers" and "corruption" he says took his livelihood from him. He says he has barely seen a cent from his biggest films; his website does include a store for DVDs and merchandise, and he has income from Social Security as well.

He also says he has no plans to re-enter the political scene, except as a blogger. On the other hand, who knows. If President Trump calls upon him, one presumes he will be ready to serve.

I asked Rebane whether there might be something to my theory that "The Giant Spider Invasion," about alien invaders who threaten the American way of life, could be read as a kind of extended allegory for Trump's signature issue, anxiety about immigration. Is that interpretation, I asked, a totally crazy way to read the film?

"I have to say, honestly: definitely not," he said. "(My films come from) what I see going on around me."
