Eight Legged Freaks : Production Notes


Eight Legged Freaks (2002) - Synopsis ImageWhat do you get when you cross toxic waste with a bunch of exotic spiders?…
Eaten!
As every fan of classic spine-tinglers knows, given the opportunity and the right chemical enhancement, arachnids will grow to humongous size and wreak havoc upon humanity. In Eight Legged Freaks the residents of a rural mining town discover that an unfortunate chemical spill has caused hundreds of little spiders to mutate into the size of SUVs.
And they're hungry.
When the alarm is sounded, it is up to mining engineer Chris McCormick (David Arquette) and Sheriff Sam Parker (Kari Wuhrer) to mobilize an eclectic group of townspeople, including the Sheriff¹s young son, Mike (Scott Terra), her daughter, Ashley (Scarlett Johansson), paranoid radio announcer Harlan Griffith (Doug E. Doug) and Deputy Pete Willis (Rick Overton) into battle against the bloodthirsty eight-legged beasts.
With state-of-the-art visual effects conceived and rendered by CFX (Independence Day (1996), Patriot, The (2000)), Eight Legged Freaks (2002) updates such inspired genre classics as Them and The Black Scorpion.
Bon appetit.

About The Production

Three Filmmakers With the Same Wild Idea

Filmmakers Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin met 10 years ago in Germany, when Emmerich was filming the feature Moon 44, in which Devlin had a starring role. Impressed with the actor's talent for improvising dialogue, Emmerich enlisted his help in writing the screenplay for his next feature, the science fiction action film Universal Soldier, and an enduring creative partnership was born. The two subsequently re-teamed for Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla and The Patriot, under the banner Centropolis Entertainment, with Emmerich directing and Devlin producing, and both of them sharing screenplay credit on all but The Patriot.
The two movie buffs often discussed their favorite films with one another. In particular, they both loved the low-budget B-movie thrillers of the 1950s and early 1960s, such as Them or Tarantula, films whose enduring popularity over the years has earned them classic status and made them a genre unto themselves. As Devlin recalls, "we were wondering if there was a way to recreate that kind of film with more sophisticated visual effects and state-of-the-art production values, to bring it into the modern era but not lose the charm and humor that made those films distinctive in the first place."
It was essential that any such updated version, regardless of its modern effects and polish, "did not take itself too seriously or deny its origins," adds Emmerich.

What they didn't know at the time was that New Zealand filmmaker Ellory Elkayem had recently written, produced and directed Larger Than Life, his own homage to the genre, a 13-minute, black and white, 1950s-style science fiction film about a small spider that gets exposed to a toxic substance, grows to monumental proportions and terrorizes a woman in her house. The film played to enthusiastic audiences at film festivals around the world and eventually earned $50,000 for the New Zealand Film Commission, a remarkable figure for a short.
After Larger Than Life screened at the l998 Telluride Film Festival, executive producer Peter Winther showed it to Emmerich and Devlin. "Ellory's short film was precisely in the vein we had been discussing," Devlin says. "It was hilarious, stylish and well-made. We knew immediately that this was the opportunity we'd been hoping for, to revitalize a dormant style that we both loved."
The three met to discuss the potential for a feature-length version of the spider short, featuring not one giant arachnid but thousands. Emmerich and Devlin wanted Elkayem to direct because, as Devlin explains, "we wanted him to express his vision the way he did so effectively in the short, only on a larger scale, with the resources of a full production team behind him, our combined experience as filmmakers, plus the best effects. In other words, let's drop a Porsche engine into a Volkswagen and see what happens."

Bruce Berman, Chairman and CEO of Village Roadshow Pictures, whose numerous and diverse credits include The Matrix, Training Day and Ocean's 11, found the concept irresistible, being a longtime fan of genre films himself and knowing that Eight Legged Freaks was in good creative hands. He brought it to the attention of Lorenzo di Bonaventura, President of Worldwide Production at Warner Bros. Pictures, as a potential joint venture. "Both Village Roadshow and Warner Bros. Pictures had wanted to work with the filmmakers for some time," Berman says, "because of their extraordinary reputations. With this particular project, we knew their expertise with effects would play a big part."
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, they¹re 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 you¹re 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 didn¹t realize until it righted itself and started to move that it was a tarantula!"
It's the buoyant humor of Eight Legged Freaks that provides relief for the anxiety aroused by watching 10-foot tarantulas stomping around on the screen and enormous orb weavers swooping down from high-rise buildings. "The laughter is a good release," says Elkayem. "because it's exhausting to be terrified every minute." Still, he admits, "A lot of people will probably be covering their eyes at least part of the time. And if they do, we will take it as a compliment."

Assembling the Two-Legged Cast

As producer Devlin points out, no matter how spectacular a film's visual effects are, "it's meaningless if you don't care about the people involved. We took a lot of time and care to establish the characters in our story, to present them as individuals and then put them into a situation in which their isolation and peril is believable," he explains.
Toward that end, the filmmakers began casting only after securing a story and setting it in a small, remote town with an underground network of abandoned mining tunnels where giant spiders might easily breed and hide.
Never losing sight of the fact that humor is part of the charm of this kind of film, Emmerich says that this influenced the filmmakers' casting choices. "When you hire actors who are adept at humor," he explains, "that nuance comes across. Even if their lines are straight -- and in most cases they are -- the actors inject subtle humor just by their delivery or their reactions."
After reading the script for Eight Legged Freaks and watching Ellory Elkayem's short film, David Arquette campaigned for the key role of Chris McCormick, a former resident of the town who has just returned following the death of his father, the owner of the mine. Chris is a quiet, introspective guy, somewhat tongue-tied in the presence of his former flame, Samantha, who is now the town sheriff, but he finds his courage quick enough when all hell breaks loose.

"David has a very natural style," says Elkayem of the versatile actor. "You don't feel that he's acting, but rather that he has become the character he's playing." That ease works well for the Chris character, who appears fairly low-key for the opening portion of the film. As Arquette describes him, "Chris has just returned to his hometown after 10 years. He's dealing with the death of his father and the hard decision about selling off the old mine, facing the woman he once loved and lost, and he's just generally disconnected and emotionally overwhelmed."
However, once the town is overrun with gargantuan spiders, a more confident Chris emerges, and Arquette shifts gears accordingly. Says Devlin, who likens Arquette to the silent film comedian Harold Lloyd, "David has an amazing comic ability as well as the depth of a well-trained actor. He came to prominence playing outrageous comic parts, but has recently been proving his talent in more dramatic work as well. All of that comes together in Chris McCormick, which is a traditional leading man role, but in a very non-traditional story."
Kari Wuhrer, who plays single mother and town sheriff Samantha "Sam" Parker, is also breaking tradition with her role. The films that inspired Eight Legged Freaks were not known for their strong female characters. Actresses in Them, Tarantula, The Black Scorpion and the like were mostly required to scream, run and faint. "When we were developing the film," says Devlin, "our intention was not to duplicate those films but to honor them by updating them, and part of that modernization was the inclusion of a strong female lead who is capable and believable in action sequences."

"What's great about Kari," Elkayem adds, "is that she not only conveys total competence in handling the action, but she is simultaneously believable as a parent, a sheriff with strong ties to the community, and as a woman who was once very much in love and might be again."
Carrying a rifle and kicking arachnid butt wasn't that much of a stretch for Wuhrer - at least not the part about the rifle. The actress attributes her familiarity with gun handling to her father's job as a police officer, and her ease with action sequences to former film roles such as Anaconda. "I love physical movie work," she says, acknowledging the appeal of a challenge. "Being able to shoot and wear a uniform, that's right up my alley."
But Sam Parker is not a cliché, nor does Wuhrer portray her as such. "It's not a pistol-packing Mom character," she clarifies. "Sam is a single mother and a sheriff, and she takes both of those jobs seriously. This is a woman accustomed to taking care of herself, her family and her community. The trouble is, she's been so focused on her responsibilities that she hasn't had much of a life of her own for a long time, and seeing Chris in town again makes her wonder about some of the choices she's made."
Scott Terra, who Devlin calls "a major discovery," plays the part of Sheriff Parker's young son Mike and so brings to life an archetype role made famous in every film of this genre, that of the intelligent-beyond-his-years youngster who has the vital answers that the adults ignore. As Elkayem explains, "it's usually the kid who knows what's going on but no one believes him until it's too late."

"Scott easily handles a fair amount of daunting technical dialogue about the scientific names of spiders and other information he delivers when things start to get out of hand," says Devlin. "In some ways it's an adult role and he pulls it off with humor and intelligence. He's completely believable."
Comedian and actor Doug E. Doug, best known as the Jamaican bobsled racer in Cool Runnings and for his role on the popular Cosby series, stepped into the part of Harlan Griffith, a paranoid radio broadcaster who fills the local airwaves with his endless rants about government conspiracies and alien invasions, from his broken-down trailer on the outskirts of town. To the townspeople, Harlan is pure entertainment, so when he begins hysterically announcing the arrival of mammoth spiders no one takes him seriously.
Doug was attracted to the story primarily because "it was fun," he says. "There are moments of true intensity but the humor pay-off is huge."
Coming from a stand-up comedy background, Doug appreciated the fact that the filmmakers were open to his interpretation of the character. "As a performer, ideally you'd like to have some room to create, within the context of the script, and Ellory is a director who has respect for that process."

Scarlett Johansson is Ashley Parker, Sam's teenage daughter. One of her scenes marks a pivotal point in the film, the moment when people finally realize what they're up against. She is cornered in her bedroom by a giant spitting spider and literally glued to the wall by its webbing. Though nonplussed by ordinary spiders in her daily life, Johansson says vividly of the onscreen experience, "being covered with that goo was the most disgusting, awful thing I've ever done in a film. It was cold and slimy and wet."
Playing her younger brother in the scene, Terra concurs, saying, "That stuff was horrible. It got all over everything. It's still on my shoes."
Devlin credits Johansson with bringing the necessary substance and likeability to her character, which is essential so that "when she's in jeopardy you really find your heart thumping in your throat. Scarlett has enormous depth as an actress and yet she's willing to do crazy scenes with spiders. You're not going to find a lot of actresses like that."
Johansson, who previously worked with Robert Redford on The Horse Whisperer, was especially impressed by the teamwork she witnessed between Elkayem, Emmerich and Devlin during production. "They were all on the set, brimming with ideas for one scene or another," she says. "Sometimes they wanted to go off in three different directions but the remarkable thing is that they never got in each other's way."

Effects Wizards Working Overtime to Give Us the Creeps

The limited special effects offered by the genre movies that had inspired the filmmakers have little resemblance to today's computer generated visual effects. For Devlin and Emmerich, who helped expand the boundaries of that technology with their collaborative work in the last decade, this made the project even more enticing. Knowing that the spiders themselves would be perceived as stars of Eight Legged Freaks, the filmmakers began developing them as early as possible.
They enlisted Visual Effects Supervisor and former Godzilla collaborator Karen E. Goulekas, whose feature credits include True Lies, Apollo 13, Terminator 2 and, coincidentally, Spider-Man, and who won a BAFTA Award for her work on The Fifth Element as well as a Saturn Award for Godzilla. The filmmakers also reunited with Visual Effects Supervisor Thomas Dadras (Starship Troopers, Deep Blue Sea) and Visual Effects Producer Drew McKeen (Armageddon, End of Days), who most recently teamed to work on the stunning visuals for The Patriot. Together, they supervised a creative team of approximately 70 specialized artists and animators engaged in bringing the eight-legged freaks to life, with Dadras and McKeen concentrating on pre-production and Goulekas leading the six-month post-production phase.

As Emmerich recalls, Dadras and McKeen lost no time in getting involved with the project, seizing on the artistic challenges immediately and beginning their work seven months prior to production. "Right away," he says, with a laugh, "they started running into stores and buying spiders so they could study them." An admitted arachnophobe, Emmerich found this somewhat unnerving when visiting his effects team to check on their progress. "I'd come by to see how they were doing on the effects and there would be aquariums full of spiders everywhere."
Research was extensive. The animators viewed hundreds of hours of nature documentary footage on arachnids in order to understand exactly how the creatures move and behave and what their individual characteristics are. Five different types of spiders appear in the film, each with its distinct look and hunting method, as itemized by Thomas Dadras, who says, "we had jumping spiders, that were the fastest-moving across the screen, trap-door spiders, that pop up in a flash and drag their victims underground, spitting spiders, that envelop their prey with a stream of sticky webbing, tarantulas, that are like tanks, and the orb weavers, that wrap everything up tight as a mummy. It's the female orb weaver that's seen as the evil leader in the film, protecting her vast underground nesting site where millions of baby spiders are incubating. She's certainly the most ferocious.
"
Each spider has its own gait," Dadras adds, noting the team's minute attention to authenticity. "The tarantula is relatively big and heavy so it walks differently than a spitting spider which is more agile and faster."

Using software specially designed for the task, the effects crew set up a virtual world inside the computer, consisting of digital cameras, lights, actor models and spider models. As Dadras explains, "We created in the computer 3-D models of the mall and the main streets of the town so that we could see where the spiders are running and which buildings they're climbing on. That's for reference, so we knew where they should be."
For proper scale, photos were taken of crewmembers standing alongside various objects of graduating size like bicycles, cars and trucks. Then, using these photos and the objects as a guide, the animators would place spiders of various dimensions into the frame until they found the size that looked most appropriate for each spider in each scene.
When it came time to insert the CG images onto the live film footage, "We took the original film negative," says Dadras, "scanned it onto the computer so that it existed as a background plate in a series of pixels, frame by frame, then combined our 3-D spider imagery to the scenes and created a new original negative with spiders on it."
Addressing their approach to this labor-intensive process, Devlin says, "Previously, we made animation to fit the existing scene. Now, we're able to render the animation ahead of time, in 3-D, and then move our virtual camera to fit the images into the live footage. This way, we are free to do an enormous amount of work prior to filming."

Prior, during and even after filming, teams of character animators worked continuously on creating and perfecting the swarming hordes. Another team of artists added color and texture, lighting, shadows and other details, and finally compositors married the finished renderings to the final print. There was never a dull moment in the effects shop.
When Karen Goulekas joined the project in its final week of shooting, the only element that had truly wrapped was the live-action footage. "The animation was well underway," she recalls, crediting Dadras with having done "most of the legwork (no pun intended), but some of the spiders needed additional texture and other details, and there were shots still being developed."
Goulekas began each day by making full rounds with animation supervisor Kelvin Lee, CG supervisor Paolo Moscatelli, compositing supervisor Abra Grupp and Digital model/texture supervisor Bret St. Clair, among the various animation, lighting and compositing stations, visiting every artist and examining the work in progress. Then, she and the filmmakers would discuss exactly what they needed and how quickly it could be accomplished. Well known in the industry for her enthusiasm and work ethic, Goulekas was not surprised to learn that many of the crew, who had worked with her on Godzilla, had been placing bets as to how long it would take before she threw the project into overdrive. "We went into a 6-day workweek mode as soon as I arrived," she admits, laughing. "I got there on a Monday and by Thursday we were into overtime."

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.

"Fur is one of the hardest things to create with computer graphics," Dadras continues. "You have to take into consideration its visual properties, its sheen, the way it reflects light, and the fact that it's composed of millions of individual hairs." The team ultimately developed its own fur shader for the process.
Another design challenge was the trap-door spider, which Goulekas dealt with in post-production. "He was a tricky one, he needed some work," she says. "Trap-door spiders have a soft look in their natural state. They're predominantly orange, almost pastel and very nearly transparent. We struggled with the color until we arrived at a deeper shade of orange and gave the body the appearance of a harder shell, more armored, sort of like a crab."
Goulekas estimates that approximately 50 brand new shots were added to the film in post-production, a good indication of how difficult it was to turn off the flow of ideas generated by the project. She credits the filmmakers for fostering a creative collaborative atmosphere in which she and the animators felt comfortable pitching their thoughts. "Sometimes the effects team doesn't get enough director feedback," she says, "but that was definitely not the case here. Every day we had walk-throughs with Ellory and Dean. I wasn't afraid to show them sketches and material in very rough form, because they were not only open to it but were immediately able to visualize and understand the potential. Someone would say 'how about if we get the spider caught in the wheel of the truck,' and someone else would add to that, 'we can make him spin out like this and come barreling forward.' Kelvin encouraged the animators to contribute their ideas as well. Consequently, everyone was excited about the work and we laughed a lot."

One scene born of this kind of brainstorming deftly employed CGI to give the illusion of a cat battling a giant spider within the walls of a house while its dumbfounded human occupants look on in terror and disbelief. Devlin proposed the idea to Goulekas, who had never prepared such a shot but immediately set to work on it and was thrilled with the result. Neither cat nor spider is seen, but evidence of their dramatic life-and-death struggle is revealed in an hilarious series of cat-shaped and spider-shaped bumps that appear in the plaster.
According to Goulekas' running tally, more than 2,000 animated arachnids were created for Eight Legged Freaks. Meanwhile, as the towering tarantulas and their pals waited in the virtual green room for their cue, the human actors were required to progress through their scenes while reacting in horrified fear to thin air.
"We were shown a test of the CGI material," says David Arquette, "so we knew how the spiders were going to look and move. We kept those images in our heads and relied upon direction from Ellory, who would tell us 'the spider is there and your life is threatened,' and then just used our imaginations." Additionally, props were manipulated on the live set in anticipation of how the jumbo spiders would ultimately move through each scene, bumping into and smashing things, to create the complete and realistic final effect. Says Scott Terra, "sometimes they used a taped X, a tennis ball or a spider model as stand-ins to indicate where they would be, more as a marker for the camera than the actors. It's not easy to act scared when you¹re looking at a tennis ball."

Enhancing the general creepiness of the visuals are the film's spine-tingling sound effects, overseen by Scott Wolf, MPSE. It was his job to imagine what extra-large arachnids tearing up a small town would sound like, which he does, from the snap of their incisors clamping down on their prey to the ominous swish of saliva in their giant mouths. And anyone who has ever winced at the sound of a gentle crunch when squashing a spider on their bedroom wall will appreciate the resounding crack made when these mutants get their gargantuan legs shattered in battle.
In addition to computer imagery, Creature Effects supervisor Bill Johnson provided numerous mechanical models of the super-sized spiders and was responsible for creating the sarcophagus-like silken cocoons that contained the orb weavers' human victims.
Of course, there were also plenty of live arachnids on hand once filming began. Arizona's Pets Inc., a facility that raises and sells hundreds of varieties of spiders to collectors, provided some 200 individual creepy crawlers to the production, including a Goliath Bird-Eater tarantula, for scenes filmed prior to the spiders' toxic enhancement. Pets, Inc. owner Don Hayes and manager Bill Ingles confirm that the Goliath is the largest tarantula on the planet, adding that there are "over 2,000 known varieties of tarantulas alone, only four of which are considered dangerous. The majority are docile and harmless."
Yeah, right.

Sometimes a Location Scout Gets a Lucky Break

How convenient would it be if a location scout hunting for a spacious defunct mall and an abandoned mine were to discover both properties, as if made to order, within a short drive of one another? This was the good fortune that befell Location Manager Alan Benoit, who discovered the historic mining town of Superior, Arizona, some 60 miles east of Phoenix, and the hull of a mall in nearby Glendale that was ideally suited for the filmmakers' needs.
Many of the original elements of the mine remained intact for exterior shots, including an impressive 200-foot steel tower that rises above the vertical entrance, known since 1910 as the Magma Copper Company's Silver Queen, from which cable and workers would be lowered deep into the multi-leveled shaft.
Unfortunately, shooting inside the existing mine tunnels was impractical, since they lay over half a mile below the surface and were extremely tight, but the production was able to solve this problem by returning to the mall. While the filmmakers shot scenes of townspeople fighting off giant spiders in the mall's central hallways, the art department was busy constructing over 150 feet of fiberglass and wood to reproduce the mine tunnels in what used to be expansive department store floor space.
Their timing was perfect. Superior's barren copper mine was scheduled for restoration by its owner, BHP Copper, but the work wasn't set to begin for some months, allowing the production to meet their filming needs comfortably. "The week after we left," says Benoit, "a group of geologists moved in to conduct a feasibility study toward re-opening the mine to explore a possible rich vein just to the south of the original."

The town is experiencing a cultural restoration as well, due to a recent population growth spurt, construction of a modern new high school and in particular, an influx of artists who are making plans to build galleries and transform the former high school site into a working arts space. But for the moment, the production was free to use the old high school facility as an effects shop. "In two years," says Benoit, "what we did wouldn't be possible."
The production also appreciated the Arizona location for its spectacular desert scenery and the quiet roads needed for several scenes in which horrified motorists skid all over the pavement to avoid giant spiders. Surrounding low hills were well suited for concealing the arachnids until the moment they sprang onto unsuspecting dirt-bikers.

Author : © Warner Bros