In the summer of 2002, it was absolutely impossible to avoid giant spiders at the movies.
That might be a little dramatic, but when you’re around nine or 10 years old in the early aughts, you really just went to the movies to see whatever Disney flick (or stupid family comedy) you’d wind up defending vigorously for the next 20 years because of nostalgia.
Especially after experiencing that disgusting close-up of the radioactive spider biting Peter Parker in Spider-Man, you didn’t want to watch the guy from See Spot Run get spooked by a giant, screeching arachnid on a poster at your local theater that seemingly hung there all summer long… or go to Dairy Queen without that stupid television spot where the jumping spiders would attack dudes riding motorcycles… or watch Cartoon Network at night just to see a horrifying TV spot of a massive spider’s legs shoot through the walls of a trailer.
With apologies to David Arquette, Doug E. Doug, teenager Scarlett Johansson, Logan Huntzberger and the state of Arizona, Eight Legged Freaks is one of our society’s worst mistakes, a film that terrorized the person writing this article past the point of comprehension.
Only watch this if you don’t want to sleep tonight.
Outside of canning completed films for tax purposes, the great sin of Warner Bros. was to release that abominable horror show (which I will never watch without rigorous financial compensation totaling eight zeros) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in the same calendar year.
Once Eight Legged Freaks‘ spine-tingling marketing campaign (that in no way should’ve been put on a children’s cartoon channel to advertise, parent company be darned) finally calmed down, it was down into Aragog “Goodbye, friends of Hagrid!” the spider’s lair for Harry and Ron and all of those spider babies that somehow couldn’t wait to eat dinner until those two Gryffindor kids got their interrogations finished with Hagrid’s horrid pet.
If you go to Orlando and ride the e-ticket Harry Potter Hogwarts ride in Islands of Adventure, they drag you down there yourself so that giant mechanical Aragog spiders can spit at you and mock your existence. You know, exactly how you want to spend your spring break.
The only time I’ve ever audibly yelled a curse word was at Aragog’s lifeless corpse popping up on the screen in the sixth Harry Potter movie; it happened twice. In 2003, you thought you might catch a break, but Frodo and Sam had to fight past Shelob’s lair in Cirith Ungol on the way to Mordor to destroy the One Ring. Again, I’ll let you guess which media company put that one out.
As someone who looks at the movie Arachnophobia as a worst-case scenario for humanity and gets the outside of his house de-webbed on a quarterly basis, giant movie spiders in movies are the bane of my existence.
While Disney cartoons like A Bug’s Life and James and the Giant Peach tried to paint spiders as maternal figures who just want to give you a hug, and the arachnid propagandist work of E.B. White turned spiders into motivational speakers for barn animals, you always knew better. You knew Eight Legged Freaks; I remember the movie I refuse to see for eight giant reasons.
It’s why, in a year set to debut two more freaking movies about giant spiders terrorizing apartment complexes, there should be a Nobel Peace Prize given to director Johan Renck and screenwriter Colby Day for bringing us our sweet, sweet Hanuš, the intergalactic spider therapist voiced by Paul Dano in Netflix’s Spaceman.
It’s genuinely the cinematic feat of a generation to turn a giant space spider into a source of marriage catharsis for a wayward spaceman, but Renck’s film somehow turns such a harrowing sight as a floating spider the size of a Buick into something oddly calming, sentient, inquisitive… nice.
The creature design is careful to recreate the spider-ness of a spider, but without that menacing crawl and blessedly no webbing. Perhaps the lack of gravity and the floating sensation helped. I’m not sure. After 31 years, it was a relief to finally see one of these giant bugs without bloodthirsty intent.
Using Dano’s chilled voice and a focus on those big spider eyes that can almost look puppy-like at the right angle, viewers are given a giant spider who means no harm and connects telepathically with Adam Sandler’s astronaut to help him unpack trauma and realize he hasn’t been a good husband. Yes, that’s the plot of the film, and it works swimmingly. Hanuš just sleeps with a radiator for the soothing vibrations, eats snacks and asks you questions about your childhood.
For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t want to change the channel or grab a flamethrower the second I saw a giant spider on television. Perhaps this is a web forward for the spiders and for me. I don’t necessarily believe in the future of spiders in the movies, but I believe in Hanuš. Maybe that’s enough. Do I owe this fictional space spider a therapy bill?
