It could be an ironic case of Spider-Man to the rescue for patients with arachnophobia, with novel research showing a Spidey movie could be just the ticket for overcoming a fear of the eight-legged creepy crawlies.

Researchers from Israel’s Ariel and Bar-Ilan Universities have become the first to explore whether watching a scene from a Marvel Spider-Man movie has potential in aversion therapy.

The answer is encouraging, they report in Frontiers in Psychiatry, after preliminary testing on over 420 adults (mean age 32) drawn from the general population.

Arachnophobia symptoms significantly reduced by 20% among the one-quarter of participants shown a seven-second clip featuring a real spider from the 2002 Spider-Man movie.