In the 1950s, Mara Corday, a nightclub showgirl and popular pinup model, was a star of three science-fiction movie thrillers, including “Tarantula” (1955), in which she fled from a 100-foot-tall spider that had escaped from a laboratory.
“The whole world is after him,” Ms. Corday told the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper that year, about the terrifying arachnid. “He’s a pretty unhappy spider, I can tell you. I’m a lady scientist, and Leo Carroll and John Agar are playing two top roles.”
At a time when sci-fi cinema was focused on subjects like alien invasions, space exploration and nuclear paranoia, Ms. Corday was cast in B-movie tales about nasty, gigantic creatures.
In 1957, she played a mathematician in “The Giant Claw,” in which a gigantic bird (first thought to be a U.F.O.) tears down buildings and foments panic. She returned that year to outsize insects, as a rancher in “The Black Scorpion,” about giant scorpions threatening the countryside after rising out of a volcanic eruption in Mexico.