What 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 Sheriff’s 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, The Patriot), Eight Legged Freaks updates such inspired genre classics as Them and The Black Scorpion.
Bon appetit.
Warner Bros. Pictures presents, in association with Village Roadshow Pictures and NPV Entertainment, An Electric Entertainment Production, starring David Arquette: Eight Legged Freaks, also starring Kari Wuhrer, Scott Terra, Doug E. Doug and Scarlett Johansson. The film is directed by Ellory Elkayem and produced by Dean Devlin and Bruce Berman, co-produced by Kelly Van Horn. Roland Emmerich, Peter Winther and William Fay are the executive producers. The screenplay is by Jesse Alexander & Ellory Elkayem, story by Ellory Elkayem & Randy Kornfield. John Bartley, ASC, CSC, is the director of photography; Charles Breen, the production designer; and David J. Siegel, ACE, the editor. Music is by John Ottman. Eight Legged Freaks will be distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, an AOL Time Warner Company, and by Village Roadshow Pictures in select territories. This film has been rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for “sci-fi violence, brief sexuality and language.”
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, 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!”
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.”
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 you’re 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.
ABOUT THE CAST
Early in his career, DAVID ARQUETTE (Chris McCormick) was involved in numerous films that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, including his starring role in Dream With The Fishes, which he also co-produced; Johns, in which he played the title character; and The Alarmist, co-starring Stanley Tucci and Kate Capshaw.
It was Arquette’s role as Deputy Dewey in the Scream trilogy that brought him to prominence and earned him his first Blockbuster Entertainment Award. Audiences also took note of his comic turn in the hit Never Been Kissed, in which he starred opposite Drew Barrymore, which brought him another Blockbuster Entertainment Award.
Arquette will be seen in several films in the coming year: The Grey Zone, an intense World War II drama which premiered at the Toronto Film festival and will be released this September, A Foreign Affair and Stealing Sinatra.
Arquette’s additional feature film credits include the comedy See Spot Run, Wild Bill and Ready to Rumble.
KARI WUHRER (Sheriff Sam Parker) has found success as a singer, model and actress. A Ford model at the age of 13, Wuhrer was cast in her first feature film, Fire With Fire, when she was 17. In 1988, she appeared on MTV as a VJ and hosted the popular mock quiz show Remote Control. In between her many television and film roles, Kari attended NYU’s Drama Department and studied with the famed actress/teacher Uta Hagen.
After moving to Los Angeles, she landed principal roles on the Fox Network’s Class of ‘96, the ever-popular Beverly Hills, 90210, and Sliders, the science-fiction adventure series on which she played Maggie Beckett opposite Jerry O’Connell.
Wuhrer was seen in the thriller Anaconda opposite Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz, Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube and in Phoenix, starring with Ray Liotta and Anjelica Huston. Among her numerous feature film credits are notable roles in Stephen King’s Thinner and The Crossing Guard, starring Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston.
Wuhrer recently completed production on the independent films The Medicine Show and Do It For Uncle Manny.
Born and raised in Connecticut, SCOTT TERRA (Mike Parker) became curious at the age of seven about how movies were made. Immediately knowing that he wanted to be part of them, the first thing he learned was how to send a picture and resume to agents. Soon he was represented in New York and making appearances on Guiding Light, All My Children and in numerous commercials.
Terra’s feature film debut, at age 10, was Shadrach, with Harvey Keitel and Andie McDowell. His most recent feature was the family film Redemption of the Ghost starring John Savage and Dianne Ladd. He has also appeared in the movies-of-the-week Motocrossed, Ground Zero, The Perfect Nanny, Sons of Mistletoe with Roma Downey, and Going Home, which starred Jason Robards and Clint Black. Scott also has a recurring role as Bert Miller on the television drama, 7th Heaven.
Terra will be seen next year in Daredevil, an action adventure which stars Jennifer Garner, Michael Clarke Duncan and Ben Affleck as Matt Murdoch, whom Terra portrays at age 12.
The hilariously animated DOUG E. DOUG (Harlan Griffith) is most familiar to movie viewers for his starring role as the spirited pushcart operator turned bobsled racer in the feature film Cool Runnings. His additional film credits include Hangin’ with the Homeboys, Class Act, Operation Dumbo Drop and That Darn Cat.
Doug’s film debut came in l990 when he earned his Screen Actors Guild card by speaking one line in Spike Lee’s film Mo’ Better Blues. The following year, he appeared in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever.
On television, Doug starred in the ABC series Where I Live, a show developed around his life, for which he also served as co-producer. In the series, he portrayed Douglas Saint Martin, a quirky teenager growing up in a working-class Caribbean family in New York. He also co-hosted the VH-1 Rock of Ages, and recently spent four seasons starring as Griffin in the television series Cosby. Doug made his debut as a director/producer with Citizen James, a film for which he also co-wrote and starred.
Doug began his entertainment career as a stand-up comic at age the age of 17. His first break came when he was seen performing at the Apollo Theatre.
SCARLETT JOHANSSON (Ashley Parker) attained worldwide recognition for her performance as Grace MacLean, the teen traumatized in a riding accident in Robert Redford’s hit feature The Horse Whisperer, a role for which she won a YoungStar award and was nominated for a Blockbuster Entertainment Award. Johansson had gained previous acclaim and an Independent Spirit nomination for her breakthrough starring role in Manny & Lo. She has most recently been spotlighted for her performances in the acclaimed films Ghost World, An American Rhapsody and the Coen Brothers film The Man Who Wasn’t There.
The New York native made her professional acting debut at age eight in the Off-Broadway production of Sophistry opposite Ethan Hawke, at New York’s Playwrights Horizons.
Johansson’s additional credits include Rob Reiner’s comedy North, the role of Sean Connery’s daughter in Just Cause, as well as notable appearances in If Lucy Fell and Home Alone 3. She is currently lensing Brian Robbins’ The Perfect Score for Paramount Pictures.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
At the 1998 Telluride Film Festival, New Zealand-born ELLORY ELKAYEM ( Director / Screenplay / Story) showcased his writing, producing and directing skills with his short film Larger Than Life, about a spider that grows to gigantic size and terrorizes a woman in her home. When executive producer Roland Emmerich saw the short, he and Dean Devlin approached the young director and teamed him with scribe Jesse Alexander to write and develop the script that became Eight Legged Freaks.
DEAN DEVLIN’s (Producer) film credits as a producer include The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson and Heath Ledger, and the monster smash Godzilla, which Devlin also co-wrote. He also produced, co-wrote and served as 2nd unit director on the blockbuster success Independence Day, which has reached an impressive $800 million gross worldwide.
Devlin also co-wrote and produced the l994 science-fiction success Stargate with Roland Emmerich, and concurrently launched the first movie website. Again with Emmerich, he executive produced the science-fiction drama series The Visitor, for which he also wrote several episodes. Before his segue into producing, Devlin was a successful Broadway, television and screen actor.
Devlin is the founding partner of Electric Entertainment, a multi-faceted entertainment organization that develops and produces a variety of ventures, including film, television, interactive, music and publishing projects.
BRUCE BERMAN (Producer) joined the production division of Warner Bros. Pictures and rose through the executive ranks to become President of Worldwide Theatrical Production. Under his aegis, the studio produced and distributed such titles as the Oscar-winning Driving Miss Daisy, as well as GoodFellas, Presumed Innocent, Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, Batman Forever, Malcolm X, The Bodyguard, JFK, The Fugitive, Dave, A Time To Kill and Twister.
In 1996, Berman started Plan B Entertainment, the Warner Bros. Pictures-based independent production company that was later acquired by Village Roadshow Pictures. Village Roadshow Pictures, where Berman now holds the post of Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, currently has 20 projects in various stages of development at Warner Bros. Pictures. Most recently, Berman executive produced the immensely successful Ocean’s Eleven, Showtime, Training Day, Cats & Dogs, Three Kings, The Matrix, Analyze This, Deep Blue Sea, Practical Magic and Space Cowboys through Village Roadshow’s partnership with Warner Bros. Pictures, as well as the hit comedy Miss Congeniality, produced jointly with Warner Bros. Pictures and Castle Rock Entertainment.
Berman will serve as executive producer for the two highly anticipated sequels to the international blockbuster The Matrix, currently in production.
KELLY VAN HORN’s (Co-Producer) film credits include co-producing credits for 1994’s Forget Paris, Leave it to Beaver, the monster hit Godzilla and The Thirteenth Floor, all films for which he also served as the unit production manager.
Van Horn’s other credits include his work as first assistant director for Raising Arizona and Spaced Invaders and as unit production manager for the mega-blockbuster successes Crocodile Dundee, Independence Day and Pearl Harbor.
ROLAND EMMERICH (Executive Producer) most recently directed and executive produced the historical epic The Patriot and also directed and executive produced Godzilla, which he co-wrote with the film’s producer, Dean Devlin. Emmerich and Devlin were also partnered on the box-office phenomenon Independence Day and l994’s epic science-fiction adventure, Stargate.
Emmerich’s first American film was the l992 action-adventure hit Universal Soldier, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. He also produced the thriller The Thirteenth Floor. Emmerich began his career in his native Germany with his student film, The Noah’s Arc Principle, which went on to open the l984 Berlin Film Festival. The feature became a success and was sold to more than 20 countries.
Emmerich subsequently formed his own production company, Centropolis Film Productions, with which he produced and directed Making Contact and Moon 44.
PETER WINTHER (Executive Producer) was co-producer of The Patriot and Godzilla, and associate producer of the box-office phenomenon Independence Day as well as Stargate.
His first association with Emmerich and Devlin was on the science fiction feature Moon 44, which Emmerich directed and co-wrote and in which Devlin starred. He rejoined the pair on Universal Soldier, which Emmerich directed and Devlin wrote, serving as Emmerich’s assistant.
Along with his producing duties, Winther also directed the second units on The Patriot, Independence Day and Stargate.
As an executive, Winther was Senior Vice President of Centropolis Entertainment, where he was in charge of developing all the material for the company during their 3-year tenure at Sony Pictures.
Winther’s other production credits include The Good Mother, starring Diane Keaton and Liam Neeson, We’re No Angels, starring Robert De Niro and Sean Penn and Cutthroat Island, starring Geena Davis.
WILLIAM FAY (Executive Producer) has a string of huge blockbuster successes as a producer that include The Patriot, Godzilla and Independence Day. Fay has also produced The Hunted, White Ghost and Bombs Away, among others.
As a child in Santa Barbara, California, JESSE ALEXANDER (Screenwriter) made several short films and studied writing at Sarah Lawrence College before earning his Masters degree at the American Film Institute. Alexander was chosen by producing duo Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin to co-write the Eight Legged Freaks screenplay with director Ellory Elkayem. Eight Legged Freaks is his first produced screenplay.
Alexander’s screenplay Berserker is currently in development with acclaimed director Alex Proyas. Alexander is also a writer/producer for the hit ABC drama Alias.
RANDY KORNFIELD (Story) is credited for the stories behind such films as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Jingle All the Way, the action-adventure Sweet Revenge and the suspense-thriller Bloodknot. Kornfield also wrote the telefilm Incident at Deception Ridge and is has a story credit for the telefilm The Secretary.
Winner of an Emmy Award for The X Files, Director of Cinematography JOHN BARTLEY, ASC, CSC (Director of Photography), also received critical accolades and three nominations from the American Society of Cinematographers for his work on the internationally popular series. Credited with revolutionizing the look of network television, Bartley was noted for his skillful use of darkness and shadow.
Bartley’s most recent feature credits are the comedy See Spot Run, starring David Arquette, and the suspense thriller Disturbing Behavior, starring Katie Holmes and James Marsden. He also lensed UPN’s dark comedy Glory Days from creator Kevin Williamson, the telefilm The Matthew Shepard Story, and the hit sci-fi series Roswell.
A New Zealand native who worked in Australia for four years before moving to Canada, Bartley’s previous credits include the series The Visitor, The Commish, Wiseguy and Booker. Movies for television include Beyond Betrayal, Echo and Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus.
CHARLES BREEN (Production Designer) studied architecture at Cranbrook, the world-renowned art and design school, before moving to California to pursue his career where he quickly gravitated to the film industry. As an art director, he has worked with such acclaimed directors as Ridley Scott (Blade Runner), Mike Nichols (Postcards From the Edge), Richard Attenborough (Chaplin), and Walter Hill (Looters). Breen has also worked with Barry Levinson on Disclosure, Clint Eastwood on The Bridges of Madison County and William Friedkin on Jade.
The jump from art director to production designer found him designing the controversial and critically acclaimed film Your Friends and Neighbors, for director Neil LaBute, starring Jason Patric and Ben Stiller, and the dark comedy Nurse Betty, also for LaBute, starring Rene Zellweger. Breen was nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Art Direction on HBO’s Weapons of Mass Distraction.
Breen sits on the Executive Committee of the Art Director Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
His recent notable film projects include the thriller Urban Legend and the ultra-hip box-office smash She’s All That. He recently designed the features Dude, Where’s My Car and Boat Trip.
DAVID J. SIEGEL, A.C.E. (Editor) previously collaborated with producers Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich as editor of their monster feature Godzilla for Sony Pictures.
He most recently edited and served as associate producer on Agnieska Holland’s The Third Miracle, for producer Fred Fuchs and executive producer Francis Ford Coppola, starring Ed Harris and Anne Heche. Siegel previously worked with Agnieska Holland on Washington Square, the romantic drama starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Albert Finney, and also on Sydney Pollack’s Fallen Angels film noir anthology series for Showtime. Other directors with whom he worked on the series are Tom Cruise, Alphonso Cuaron, Michael Lehmann and Peter Bogdanovich.
Siegel began his career as an assistant editor on Warren Beatty’s Reds and has more than 25 feature film credits, including Ron Howard’s Parenthood, Backdraft and Far and Away, as well as The Glass Menagerie, Q&A, Silkwood, Death of a Salesman, and The Prince of Tides.
He crossed over to become a full editor while working with David Lynch on several projects, including On the Air and Hotel Room. Siegel was also the standby editor on John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor and Alan Alda’s Sweet Liberty. His editing credits also include the film Blessed Assurance for Peter Bogdanovich, starring Cicely Tyson, as well as Civil Wars for Steven Bochco. He has worked with such other notable directors as Sidney Lumet, Lee Grant, Michael Apted, Mike Nichols and Paul Newman.
Siegel received an Emmy Award nomination for his work on the critically acclaimed series Law and Order. He is a member of the American Cinema Editors Organization.
JOHN OTTMAN (Music) graduated from USC’s School of Cinema-Television in 1988 and was named one of Daily Variety’s 50 People to Watch in 1997. The acclaimed Ottman was nominated for an Emmy Award for his Outstanding Music Composition for the pilot of Fantasy Island and also won a Saturn Award for Best Music for the critical and audience favorite, The Usual Suspects.
Among his other feature composing credits are Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, Apt Pupil, Lake Placid, Urban Legends: Final Cut and Bubble Boy. Upcoming for Ottman are Luis Mandoki’s Trapped, starring Kevin Bacon, and X2, Bryan Singer’s follow-up film to the box-office smash X-Men.
