It takes a lot to scare a man like . He’s faced Nazis, The Red Baron, Cults, hostile indigenous tribesmen, ancient Templars, entities from another dimension, and of course Time Travelling White Supremacists. But there’s one ⭕thing t🎐hat terrifies him more than anything else in the world. Well, two if you count being a committed husband and father figure, and that’s Snakes.

It’s a common fear shared by many and it’s a bit of Indy lore that first popped up in Raiders of The Lost Ark when Indy had an encounter with his friend Jock's pet Snake Reggie. Later movies would continue to reference Indy’s phobia, but where did it come from? To help answer that, here’s everything you need to know about why Indiana Jones hates Snakes.

What Is The Fear Of Snakes Called?

The fear of snakes is called Ophidiophobia, and approximately half the population of America has a form of it to one degree or another. Extrapolate that to the globe and you can see that it’s a fairly common fear.

In most cases, Ophidiophobia is caused by a traumatic event involving snakes, usually at a young age. When around their trigger animal, an Ophidiophobe will experience symptoms of heightened or extreme anxiety and in some situations, it can cause someone to comp💞letely pass out.

Indiana being an Ophidiophobe that’s subjected to snakes so regularly and yet still takes it on the proverꦺbial chin is quꦯite an impressive feat.

Warning: Spoilers F𒁏or The Indiana Jones Movie Franchise Below

Why Does Indiana Jones Hate Snakes?

Because the Indiana Jones movies are so approachable and easy to understand, it’s pretty easy to point exactly at the point where Indy had a traumatic run-in with a snake. It happened in the first Act of The Last Crusade, and those familiar with it wi🐷ll definitely agr♊ee that it was a pretty rough time for Jones.

At the beginning of the movie, we see young Indiana Jones and his friend out patrolling on their horses as part of their Boy Scout duty in Utah. They come across a cave containing the lost Cross of Coronado and unfortunateꦑly, there are some men inside looting the place.

Ironically, in this part of the movie, Indy’s friend gets spooked by a snake, whilst Jones himself just picks it up casually and tosses it with a mocking comment of “It’s just a snake”. Something he’ll regret saying in about ten minutes from that point.

Young Indiana Jones in this part of the movie is played by the late River Phoenix.

Indy of course steals the cross in order to make sure it gets into the hands of a museum where it belongs and he’s chased by the looters, eventually jumping onto a moving train. The locomotive in question is owned by Dunn And Duffy Circus and it’s currently transporting all their animals, including the very dangerous ones, across the country.

There’s a big bombastic chase scene across the roof of the locomotive which culminates in Indy falling into the Reptile Car of the train, and then things take a turn for the traumatic. After narrowly avoiding a massive python in one enclosure when the platform above it collapses, poor young Indiana then dives out of it directly into a pen full of hundreds of smaller snakes.

These slither all over his body and his face, and they even get inside his clothes. Which of course horribly traumatizes the young Indiana Jones who simply rises out of the mass screaming bloody murder. And that, at the time, was the scene that showed where Indiana Jones’s fear of snakes came from.

Technically Jones’s first encounter with a huge snake was in the Young Indiana Jones TV Series episode Passion For Life. Th🦩ough there’s some debate 🦩as to whether the show is canon anymore.

Every Indiana Jones Movie Encounter With Snakes

At first, Indiana's rough encounter with his new slithery friend was just a bit of setup for a payoff of helping build tension in a later scene of the movie, and it worked perfectly. Indy doesn’t like Snakes, and now he’s stuck in a room with a ton of them, he’s tense, we&rsquo🍰;re tense &md🃏ash; it just works.

But as the series went on, Indiana's fear of Snakes would eventually be given its origin, but it would quickly become almost flanderized and turned into a way to do some tick-the-box storytelling. With it being its most embarrassing in the fourth and fifth films.

But we’ll get to those as it’s worth going through each movie, other than Last Crusade to see every time Indy starts shrieking after seeing something slithering.

Raiders Of The Lost Ark

Our first foray into Indy’s fear is first found in the final part of the Temple Escape scene in the First Act of the film. Here he’s sprinting down a lush green jungle hillside,𝕴 followed in hot-pursuit by hostile natives. His one escape route, Jock, fishing off his small seaplane nearby.

Indy swings onboard, the plane takes off, and he looks down to see “Reggie”, Jock's pet Python. A massive lad of a reptile curled up happily around Indy’s feet. Indiana of course naturally reacts to this as calmly as you would think, in that he freaks out and momentarily considers tossing the snake over the side.

He of course can’t do that because it’s his friend and source of escape's pet. And so Jones, given nowhere to run to, settles in for what possibly felt like the longest flight in his life.

The next time we see Indiana grimacing about being amongst some slithering new friends is around the midway point of the movie, just before he’s caught by the Nazis whilst recovering The Ark of the Covenant. He and Sallah had just opened the Well of Souls when they noticed the floor moving, only to discover the entire room was covered with Snakes.

It's made even worse when Indy is joined by Marion Ravenwood who's unceremoniously tossed into the tomb by the Nazis after the Ark has been removed. The room, which already had a ton of dangerous Asps and Cobras in it before, starts to fill up wi𒊎th even mo✤re snakes.

They escape eventually but it’s a rough time for everyone involved, especially Marion.

The opening of the Well Of Souls scene is where we get the iconic Indiana Jones line: “Snakes, why’d it have to be Snakes?”.

Temple Of Doom

Temple of Doom has a few blink-and-you-’ll-miss-it-type encounters with Snakes for Indy, but they are there. The first is during the camping scene with Willie Scott, where✨ she’s having a hard time adjusting to being close to nature.

Eventually, a large snake wraps around her and she tosses it near Indy who recoils and climbs up a big boulder in fear.

Then there’s the infamous and controversial feast scene where we see the likes of Chilled Monkey Brains and “Snake Surprise”. The surprise being that it’s a giant snake, filled with lots of smaller Eels that ooze out when it's cut into. It’s not the worst thing to happen to Jones in that movie, but it&r🉐squo;s Grade-A ni🐈ghtmare fuel for Ophidiophobes.

The last little bit we get is when Indy is recovering the Sankara Stones and gets spooked by a statue of a Cobra just above his h♌ead and he ওgives it a little glare in return.

The Crystal Skull

There are a lot of things Crystal Skull did wrong. But we’re keeping our focus on Snakes and unfortunately, it’s as cartoonish as you would think. Whilst trying to escape the Russians in the Jungle, Indiana and Marion accidentally and “comedically” stand on Quicksand.

Mutt rescues Marion pretty quickly but Jones simply sinks up to his armpits whilst watching the whole thing play out before a now-free Marion and Mutt toss him a lifeline.

A suspiciously thick and hissing “Rope”.

According to Dial of Destiny, Mutt died in Vietnam after Crystal Skull.

The rope is of course a snake, and Indiana panics and pleads for them to say: “Grab the rope”. He eventually convinces himself that the angrily hissing, and surprisingly non-biting Snake, is in fact a rope.

He grabs it and the snake stretches far beyond what a reptile supporting the weight of an elderly Harrison Ford should be able to, and he's unceremoniously pulled out of the mire.

The first snake tossed at Ford is real with a bit of CG thrown in, but the one he🐼 grabs is of course a big rubber puppet that’s stretched almost to breaking point.

The Dial Of Destiny

Just when you thought they were done with Snakes in an Indiana Jones movie, it seems they can’t quite stop beating that severely dead horse. In Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, they kick things up a notch by not using snakes, but Eels.

The reason we bring this up is that in the movie Indy’s new friend Teddy Kumar makes the observation that the Eels in the ocean they're about to dive into look like Snakes, to wh🍰ich Indy immediately tries to shut down with a stern “No they don’t”.

It’s a groan-inducing introduction to an underwater nightmare of CGI, and that’s before the Eels show up. When they do, they swarm Indiana, who can’t seem to save himself once again as he tries to scare them off with a flare, but gets a bit muddled and trapped. Only for Helena to once again come to the rescue. And that’s all we get about Indiana and Snakes as the movie lurches onwards to another disaster of a scene.

This particular scene was felt by many as one of the more blatant attempts to shoehorn in old Indiana Jones moments for tick-the-box nostalgia points.