Elkayem immediately set to work with Randy Kornfield to prepare a story outline, and later joined forces with screenwriter Jesse Alexander to write the screenplay for Eight Legged Freaks, working on Elkayem’s premise that, "it should be scary, and funny, and suspenseful, all at the same time."
Stylistically, Berman points out, "The trick was not to sink into campiness, but to make a film that works on its own terms. Even though it’s an homage to those science fiction movies many of us grew up with, it should also work for a generation that perhaps never experienced those movies and is being exposed to the genre for the first time."
Elkayem and Alexander developed a unique collaborative technique that those 1950s screenwriters could only imagine in their science fiction dreams. Using the internet, they took turns e-mailing each other revised versions of their draft in progress. "This was the most effective method for us," Elkayem explains. "We could revise in colors so that each of us could see exactly what the other had done and we could cross passages out without deleting them, in case we needed to refer to them later. This eliminated the necessity for us to be constantly in the same place, or even working at the same time. "
Everyone was certainly on the same page when it came to their uneasiness about spiders, although they offered various theories about why these relatively harmless beasts strike such terror into the average person, even without toxic enhancement.
"I think it’s primarily the legs," says Elkayem, wickedly. "It’s the way they move with those eight creepy legs. Also, they’re sudden and unpredictable. They can be anywhere at any time, including above your head on the ceiling, or on your clothing, or in your shoe, and you’re completely unaware of their presence until you happen to catch a glimpse of them peripherally and it’s a shock. It makes you wonder if there are others lurking about that you haven’t seen yet – and where exactly are they?"
Devlin suggests the possibility that arachnophobia is a primal fear dating back to our earliest ancestors, and supports this idea with a story related to him by one of the crew members who recently worked on a film with chimpanzees. Every time the chimps saw spiders, they became visibly agitated. As for himself, the producer freely admits, "I can’t stand them! They creep me out. They give me the willies."
But it’s clearly Roland Emmerich who is most qualified to speak on the subject of spiders and the heebie-jeebies, having had a harrowing close encounter himself on a recent holiday, coincidentally several months prior to beginning production on the film. "I was visiting Mayan ruins in Mexico," he recalls, "and staying in a small hotel adjacent to a jungle. As I pulled my pants on one morning, my foot pushed out a furry object from inside one of the legs. I didn’t realize until it righted itself and started to move that it was a tarantula!"
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