I doubt that. Hollywood probably used them as villains because people were already scared of them. The fear of spiders, ... is believed to be a primal fear, an evolutionary safeguard, because some of them are indeed dangerous (and especially there were mankind is believed to have started).
Don't know how much of that is proven. And I wasn't aware of a typical fear of bats (maybe I watched to much batman).
You can't just link to a paper (behind a pay-wall, of all things) and expect me to find the relevant part! Explain why it's relevant. I just spent 20 minutes reading that paper ಠ_ಠ and I see no evidence to support the argument. The paper I linked to by the same author explicitly contradicts it:
>The tendency of Europeans and their descendants to be fearful of spiders does not seem to be shared by people in many non-European cultures, and this is not consistent with those evolutionary accounts of spider fear which suggest that spider fear should be a common feature of the human gene pool regardless of culture (e.g. Seligman, 1971). However, it is consistent with the present thesis which argues that spider fear developed as a result of the association between spiders and disease in Europe after the tenth century
It's not a real citation if it doesn't support the point.
Linking to a paper and hoping people believe it supports you because it's a paper is poor form. I expect people to be able to analyze their citations - that's pretty standard practice.
