The Big Picture

Eight Legged Freaks is a genuine homage to classic B-movie creature features, offering fun, cheesy entertainment with a campy, self-serious tone. The film successfully balances horror and humor, with violent spider attacks alongside silly, campy moments like spiders with high-pitched voices and slapstick mistakes. The characters in Eight Legged Freaks deliver intentionally campy performances, adding to the overall charm and enjoyment of the film.

Whatever happened to the good old-fashioned B-movie creature features of yesteryear? You know the kind: An isolated town or a top-secret government laboratory is invaded by a monster of some pseudoscientific origin — usually of the giant insect or animal variety — to wreak havoc upon an ensemble of relatively unknown actors with over-the-top theatrical performances. The cast will most commonly include a sheriff, a scientist, and dastardly teens as canon fodder. The themes will typically have some sort of surface-level moral reflection on the dangers of uncontrolled industry and experimentation. They’re always slightly too self-serious for their cheesy visuals, but just tongue-in-cheek enough to make that a virtue rather than a limitation, masterfully striking a difficult tonal balance despite seeming rather low-quality at first glance. They’re camp, silly, and not all that scary, but these movies offer unique, whacky, wholly fun entertainment. Sadly though, modern-day cinema has become too cynical in its massified industrial complex, leaving little room for smaller budget, sillier horror concepts to be taken just seriously enough by the cast, crew, and the studio to create the vital ingredient of the B-movie creature feature: genuine, earnest camp.

Perhaps one of the last great examples of mainstream Hollywood nailing the B-Movie creature feature formula was 2002’s ultraviolent horror-comedy Eight Legged Freaks, starring David Arquette and an at-the-time upcoming young actress Scarlett Johansson. Set in an isolated desert mining town in Arizona, Eight Legged Freaks tells a tale of an exotic spider and tarantula farm being exposed to a toxic waste spill, causing the thousands of creepy critters that live there, ranging from jumping spiders to Tarantulas, to grow colossal in size and venture out into town to hunt down and prey upon the eccentric locals. Through barrels of cheesy laughs and light, fun horror, it’s a film made with genuine care and effort by people who know how to make A-tier cinema but chose to make a film that pays homage to 50s cheese, camp, and shlock as a love letter rather than a crutch for lacking budget or passion (unlike contemporary attempts at B-movie creature features like Cocaine Bear or The Meg). So, let’s dive into what made Eight Legged Freaks so much fun compared to its contemporary counterparts!

What Is ‘Eight Legged Freaks’ About?

Like any good creature feature, Eight Legged Freaks first establishes its central cast of characters before plunging them into a death-filled monster mash: Bad boy Chris McCormick (Arquette) returns to his hometown after riding off into the sunset a decade earlier, back after his father’s death to claim his inheritance of lucrative mining tunnels. Cuckoo conspiracy theorist and radio DJ Harlan Griffiths (Doug E. Doug) spouts his ravings and rantings on the extensive details of aliens and alien probing from his ramshackle trailer park home. Sassy girlboss Sheriff Sam Parker (Kari Wuhrer) struggles to keep her rebellious teen daughter Ashley (Johansson) in line as she gets involved with a biker gang while also worrying about her son Mike (Scott Terra) spending too much time at the local spider farm with its creepy proprietor.

There’s not much time for formalities, however, as soon the hordes of toxic spiders break free from their cages and set up shop in Chris’ mining tunnels to evolve and grow, ready to enter a violent feeding frenzy on any unlucky victim they encounter. Jumping Spiders, Orb weavers, Tarantulas, Trapdoor Spiders, Spitting Spiders, Tiger Wolf Spiders… All sorts of physiologically accurate depictions of scaled-up arachnid creatures get ready to hunt down the locals of Prosperity, Arizona. Less than 20 minutes into the film, the feeding begins, and the audience is treated to an extended montage of these different species’ hunting techniques being applied to cats, ostriches, and eventually, humans, starting with unfortunate miners and moving onto dirt-bike-riding teens in the desert.

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The spiders get increasingly violent in their hunt, eventually moving out of the dark caves and dusty desert plains and into the town’s city center of highway stores and housing complexes. The true slaughter begins, and the film’s body count very quickly stacks up to shockingly high levels for a PG-13 movie as we see hundreds of townsfolk being attacked and eaten alive. Our central cast of characters has to join forces along with the rest of the survivors, retreating into the town’s shopping mall as a last bastion of protection against the unforgiving wave of hungry monsters. Who survives the night in the battle against arachnid forces is best left for your discovery, but trust us when we say that barely anyone will be left standing before these creepy crawlies’ bellies are full!

Why ‘Eight Legged Freaks’ Is The Last Great American B-Movie Creature Feature

Written by Jesse Alexander and directed by Ellory Ekayem, Eight Legged Freaks was a surprise sleeper hit of the summer of 2002, seemingly coming out of nowhere and feeling like a film of a bygone era. It earned the love of audiences and critics alike, with Roger Ebert praising the thrills and subtle wit hidden under its shlocky surface. Like the Kevin Bacon-fronted Tremors a decade before it, the film dropped a horde of monsters on a small, all-American town of whacky, eccentric characters to simultaneously horrific and comically campy effect. The film felt out of place in 2002 though, a year defined by self-serious, dark, and brooding cinema bearing Nu Metal-centric soundtracks and moody nighttime city shots. Nobody was asking for a mainstream creature feature packed with camp and genuine whimsy, but we got it, and oh boy was it a fun film! It’s a shame it was one of the last successful films of its kind, though, with only a handful of examples to follow suit such as James Gunn’s 2006 gross-out film Slither.

Contemporary films that try to emulate the classic formula of the B-movie monster flicks of the 20th century like Them, The Thing From Another World, or Piranha tend to be instilled with a sense of cynicism and ingenuity. On the one hand, there are examples such as The Meg and Cocaine Bear, which fail to capture the campiness of the films they’re inspired by through seemingly being “too cool” for them, with big actors, polished CGI, and Joss Whedon sense of sarcasm, smirks, and disingenuousness in the face of their silliness. Then, you have examples like Sharknado at the other end of the scale, which are self-aware and in on the joke, but badly masquerade their absolute awfulness and non-existent budget under the guise of “irony.” Both examples feel disingenuous, too insecure to fully take the audience on a journey into their campy, over-the-top worlds and concepts out of fear of being laughed at or, more importantly, disregarded and left in the colossal pile of modern-day abandonware of streaming (a futile effort).

Eight Legged Freaks, on the other hand, comes barging through the door like an overly excited child on a sugar rush, completely genuine in its hyperactive fun and whimsical charm. The film wasn’t high-budget or low-budget, meaning it does have an undeniable advantage over a lot of other B-movies that have to run on shoestrings. Either way, it still manages to do so much with those dollars and makes up for what it couldn’t do with passion and creativity. The level of scale and action presented feels like it cost far more than its budget: A town-wide giant spider invasion with thousands of extras getting mowed down and eaten on screen, exploding trucks and cars, fire, guns — the works! And most importantly, the spiders: Using a clever mix of CGI, practical limbs, and webs, the spiders are incredibly personality-packed and imaginative in their presentation and their attacks, being both horrifying and wacky in equal measure while maintaining a strong sense of accuracy for arachnid behaviors in the wild — all while maintaining that B-Movie shlock.

How ‘Eight Legged Freaks’ Balances Camp And Horror
Image Via Warner Bros.

The spiders also embody the film’s coolest quality: eccentric, campy humor juxtaposed with a very real, very mean-spirited threat. The spiders all hunt without prejudice or mercy, using the horrifying techniques they would use in real life, like building trap doors in the sand to violently leap out of and yank unsuspecting victims into, or even worse, wrap them up in webs and subsequently inject them full of acid to quite literally melt them alive from the inside out. It’s horrifying stuff! It’s all shown on screen and, although with little in the way of blood and guts, drenched in a brutality and mean-spirited carnage that really pushes that PG-13 rating. Yet somehow, the spiders manage to be… cute and funny at the same time? The film uses the legendary voice of actor Frank Welker to give the spiders these incredibly silly, high-pitched voices, making stooge-like noises whenever they make slapstick mistakes or commit over-the-top attacks. A jumping spider humping a dear head, a tarantula karate-chopping a man to death… It’s very Gremlins-esque, and if the deliberate campiness of it all wasn’t apparent enough, there’s a scene where a jumping spider pays homage to Bugs Bunny’s bush camouflage gag to sneak up on and eat a poor old man.

The characters that the spiders are preying upon add so much too, with every town member delivering intentionally campy, tongue-in-cheek performances without losing their earnest charm. Some character highlights include the mumbling, cowardly deputy sheriff (Rick Overton) avenging his cat’s death by taking on the critters with a chainsaw, the parody of the blind doorman with too many keys as he struggles to find the right one when being chased, a biker boy pulling a sick jump on his dirt bike while scissor kicking jumping spiders midair, and the simple decision of casting David Arquette of all people to play a bad boy action hero. Everything from the personality-packed monsters to the eccentric, deliberately theatrical characters combine to make a genuinely brilliant B-movie homage that they just don’t make anymore! If you want a fun, unassuming, popcorn-friendly horror comedy to watch, then look no further than Eight Legged Freaks.

Eight Legged Freaks is available to watch on DIRECTV

Watch on DIRECTV