[1] Richard Wentworth (Warren Hull), an amateur criminologist who is friendly with the police and is secretly "The Spider," a masked vigilante, is equally determined to destroy the Octopus and his gang.

The only people who know Wentworth's various identities are his assistants Jackson (Richard Fiske) and Ram Singh (Kenne Duncan), his butler Jenkins (Don Douglas), and his fiancée Nita (Iris Meredith).

Each chapter ends with The Spider or his friends in deep trouble, often about to be killed, but the effect is spoiled by a trailer for the next episode which follows, showing them rescued and continuing to fight the villains.

[2] The original pulp magazine stories were too violent for the motion picture production code, but The Spider's Web "did manage to suggest [their] frantic pace".

Beginning with the pulp's sixth issue in 1934, The Spider employed horror makeup consisting of a "fright wig", fangs, a false hooked nose, and a hunchback.

The screenplay was written by serial scenarists George H. Plympton and Basil Dickey, feature-film writer Robert E. Kent, and newspaperman Martie Ramson, whose hard-boiled short stories were syndicated in 1935 and 1936.

The Spider's Web was wildly successful when first released in 1938; it was the most popular serial of that year, according to a tally published in The Motion Picture Herald and its sister publication The Film Daily,[6] and was such an exhibitor favorite that Columbia used it to launch a series of reissues in 1947.