Goulekas understood what the filmmakers were trying to achieve. "They wanted the spiders to have personality and attitude," she explains. "This wasn’t a matter of using a computer flocking program and a swarm of insects. Our spiders are attacking humans, getting shot, interacting and fighting with one another, crashing into things. We needed to provide them some range of emotion and reactive response, as well as individuality. Above all, this wasn’t supposed to be serious, it was meant to make people laugh."
One of the first thoughts that stuck the longtime animation fan when she attended a production screening of Eight Legged Freaks temporary footage, was that there wasn’t quite enough, well, goop on screen. "I feel that the ‘ewww, gross’ factor is essential for a film like this, just like the films it pays homage to, and that’s an integral part of its humor," she says, with an undeniable appreciation for the genre. "When these monstrous spiders are hit, a lot of green goop has to come squirting out and splatter over everything. They were calling me the goop goddess for weeks because that was my first comment."
Goop aside, it was the filmmakers’ intention from the start to depict the spiders realistically. As Elkayem explains, "Working with the story element of toxic waste, theoretically we had license to turn these spiders into anything, but we felt it was far more effective to take them as they actually look and simply enlarge them, knowing that spiders are already pretty terrifying just the way they are. We didn’t need to push it too far."
Berman agrees, saying, "The terror is more pronounced if you can accept that these monstrous creatures are real, which we can best achieve by making them authentic in every detail and then bringing them up to such a scale that you can actually see the detail."
As it turned out, the designers were forced to make some alterations, due to the nature of the beast. Says Drew McKeen, "On some of the spiders, once enlarged, it looked as though their eyes were not focusing forward enough so we gave them more of a frontal placement, which had the added advantage of making their features more menacing. We customized them a little bit."
Rendering the tarantula accurately proved problematic because on a giant scale it looked, well, just a little too cuddly. As Dadras describes it, "Ordinarily, a tarantula’s maximum size is 10 or 12 inches around, approximately the size of a dinner place, but when you make it 5 feet tall with a 15-foot circumference, some of its natural characteristics work against the image you’re trying to create. For example, the tarantula is furry, which looks appropriate in a small size, but when it’s the size of a truck the fur starts to look too friendly, sort of like a giant cuddly teddy bear."
To remedy that, the animators shaved some of the friendly fuzz off the tarantulas’ legs and gave them some bald patches, especially near the face and front pedipalps, which, Dadras explains, "are more like arms than legs, and which the spider uses primarily to shovel food into its mouth and fangs.
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