Big Creepy-Crawlies

"That planet has bugs, Carter. Big, huge, ugly, honkin' bugs!"

— Jack O'Neill, Stargate SG-1, "Bane"

Giant bugs. They are bugs or muppets or Serkis Folk, whichever, but all are mad creepy. They have no individuality or intelligence, except possibly a Hive Mind. Considering almost all variants are hostile towards humans, and every single one of them is really ugly, nobody really worries too much about the morality of killing them.

While these creatures are very widespread and can be encountered in many different places, the trackless depths of the Hungry Jungle, the barren wastes of the Standard Post-Apocalyptic Setting and the unearthly landscapes of alien worlds are among their most common nesting grounds.

Subtropes include:

For the Super-Trope of abnormally-sized animals in general, see Animals Not to Scale.

This often overlaps with Atrocious Arthropods, as Big Creepy Crawlies are often depicted as hideous and dangerous beings. See also Scary Scorpions, Creepy Centipedes, Creepy Cockroach, Bee Afraid, Wicked Wasps, Moth Menace, Lice Episode and Bug War. If they are from space, they're Insectoid Aliens. If they have a lust for galactic domination, they are a Horde of Alien Locusts. A subset of Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever and Dire Beast. These are especially common in prehistoric settings. Videogames (and Kaiju) seem to love combining this trope and Macabre Moth Motif. Some of them are also Proportionately Ponderous Parasites. Often led by a queen.

To some extent, this was once Truth in Television, back in the Carboniferous Period, but only possible due to higher oxygen levels at the time. Such animals lack lungs and breathe, at best, via trachea stuck in the abdomen wrapped in carapace. So ones that get too big can't absorb enough oxygen to survive, and those that get a lot of trachea (centipedes) constantly risk dehydration. The Square-Cube Law also holds them down. These restrictions are downplayed underwater, however.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

Astro Boy features several insectoid robots, such as the Carabus, a beetle-like tank built by the French military; Gadem the robot centipede and most incarnations of North Number Two from the Pluto arc.
Blue Gender: The Blue all resemble giant insects.
Delicious in Dungeon: One of the first monsters Team Touden encounters and subsequently eats is a giant scorpion. They make it into hotpot.
Digimon has had some examples over the years with Kabuterimon and Stingmon being the most well known examples.

El-Hazard: The Magnificent World: The entire Bugrum Empire is absolutely crawling with car-sized beetle-like creatures.
Gintama: An early part has the gang dealing with some giant alien cockroaches that have invaded their house.
Hunter × Hunter: The Chimera Ants are human-sized ants and extremely dangerous. By eating other creatures, a Chimera Ant queen can impart the characteristics of ingested creatures onto the next generation of Chimera Ants it gives birth to. To take advantage of the genes of a particular species, Chimera Ants have been known to feed until the fodder species is driven to extinction in its ecosystem. That means, most of Chimera Ants don't look like actual ants, they look more like humanoid mixed-animals. The Chimera Ant King and his three Royal Guards are the most powerful living beings of the world. And only one of them is killed in a battle, while the other three, including the King, are killed by the poison of the Miniature Rose, a genocide bomb.
The Island of Giant Insects follows a group of students that crash-land on an island where all the bugs, from wasps to ticks to tiger beetle larvae to fireflies, have somehow turned gigantic.
Jōjū Senjin!! Mushibugyō: One bug is big enough to have a bear in its maw and it's just an ordinary one. There are also bugs so big that they literally dwarf the city of Edo.
Kimba the White Lion has an episode where a grasshopper was mutated by radiation and the end product was this trope.
Macross Frontier: The Vajra range in size from large jet-fighter-sized grunts to ones larger than most capital ships. Their queen in particular is several kilometers in size.
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS: Lutecia summons insects of varying levels of largeness. From the human-sized Garyu, to the car-sized Jiraiyo, to the Kaiju-sized Hakutenou.
Mazinger Z:
- Overlapping with Animal Mecha, several Mechanical Beasts from the first series (such as Winder A2 or Megaron P1 and its "brothers") resemble giant, vaguely-humanoid insects.
- Great Mazinger: One whole host of the Mykene Empire army is made up of bio-mechanical, massive insects. Their commander, General Scarabeth, resembles a gigantic rhinoceros beetle.
Naruto: The seven-tailed beast, Choumei, is a gigantic beetle.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind has several of these, like the building-sized woodlice known as the Ohmu. While they can be unbelievably dangerous when provoked, they're usually quite docile and kindly, with the Ohmu being portrayed as extremely wise Gentle Giants, akin to terrestrial whales.
Negima! Magister Negi Magi: The Magic World jungle contains dung beetles that are around the size of a human torso.
Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee not only has giant soul-devouring insects, but they also have exoskeletons made of metal that grant them Nigh-Invulnerability.
Toriko: Tommyrod keeps eggs of giant horrible insects in his own body and uses his own nutrients to nurture them to maturity as he spits them out. He's even created unnatural hybrid insects designed for maximum slaughter.
Yu-Gi-Oh!:
- Several of Weevil Underwood's monsters, most notably Perfectly Ultimate Great Moth and Insect Queen, are textbook examples of this trope. Naturally, Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series had fun with this one.
  Yami Yugi: Go! Summoned Skull! Destroy his cheap Mothra imitation!
- Other duelists in the franchise who specialized Insect Monsters were Ren from Yu-Gi-Oh! GX and Uryu from Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds. (Both were one-shot characters.)
YuYu Hakusho: The Demon World contains massive centipede-like monsters that dwarf trees and some mountains. They serve as transport in Mukuro's realm.

Card Games

Magic: The Gathering: Several Insect creatures fall under this — many reach and exceed the size of oxen.
- Crash of Rhino Beetles depicts a stampeding herd of beetles over twice as tall as trees.
- The Drudge Beetle is an insect large enough to be used as a beast of burden.
- The Giant Adephage is a monstrously large beetle shown crawling over the ruins of a city.
  "To a creature like that, we must seem like, well, bugs." — Dars Gostok, Firefist captain
- The Hawkeater Moth is not as large as the game's other examples, but still big enough to prey on hunting birds.
- The krotiqs of Tarkir are centipede-like creatures of absurd size. Beasts such as Ambush Krotiq and Segmented Krotiq dwarfsbeasts that haul full-sized forts around and can prey on dragons.
- The Lithophage is an insect so huge that it consumes mountains.
- The Moonwing Moth is so big that the birds flying alongside it look like barely more than bugs themselves.
Yu-Gi-Oh!: Many Insect type monsters count as this, their size range from realistically small, to as large as a man, to the size of Kaiju.

Comic Books

The DCU:
- Supergirl: The Godship spawn in Bizarrogirl are larger-than-human, insect-like, green bugs with a hard carapace, three pairs of legs and huge maws.
- Superman: In an issue of Kryptonite Nevermore, Superman faces off against two rhino-sized ants. After the fight Superman notes that their size would have doomed them soon anyway.
- The Jungle Line reveals that one of the creatures which inhabited Krypton's Scarlet Jungle was an anaconda-sized, ant-headed green caterpillar.
- Death & the Family: The Insect Queen's bug minions are larger-than-a-human, mutated ants and wasps.
- Terra: The Illumi-Mites are a subterranean race who look like large flying bugs, about a foot long. Atlee is friends with their prince K'a.
- Tomahawk: In #99, Tomahawk and his Rangers battle Chief Cobweb: a Native American who can speak to and control insects and arachnids and has access to variety of giant version a hornet, a firefly and a Giant Spider.
Mortadelo y Filemón: In El Sulfato Atómico, the first full story, the title agents have to recover a sulfate that makes insects grow to gigantic size.
El Toxico is set in a world where insects have grown to the size of people, and have destroyed society attacking them.
Giant Robot Warrior Maintenance Crew: Herotron has a nasty infestation of space parasites, which are about as tall as a human being.
Marvel Universe:
- Annihilation: The footsoldiers of the Wave are giant bugs from the Negative Zone, raging from human-sized, to kaiju sized. Not surprising that after everything is over, Richard Rider has a serious hatred for bugs.
- Ant-Man: Ant telepathy plus the ability to drastically shrink and grow things makes the control of gigantic insects one of Ant-Man's tricks of the trade.
Juice Squeezers: The entire premise of the book is that a team of kids are secretly a team who meet after school to go down into the tunnels below Weeville, California, and take care of the gigantic insects living there.
Star Trek: Mission's End, the residents of Archenar-IV are a race of giant spiders, who are sentient, interestingly enough. For transport they ride (which looks really weird) giant centipedes which they call Crawlers.
Suspense: In Issue #14, "Death and Doctor Parker", an apocalyptic interplanetary war strips the Earth of any animal life besides insects and the immortal main character. In the ages that follow, arthropods regain supremacy over the world and grow to immense sizes.
Tales of the Jedi: Colossus wasps are giant spacefaring insects native to the Stenness Node that grow to the size of large starships — in fact, their exoskeletons are a popular choice of spaceship hulls.
We Kill Monsters: Vanessa's father is kidnapped and killed by a gigantic bug monster.

Fan Works

Ascendant: The Shirubakumo family all have spider-based Mutation Quirks, ranging from just possessing additional eyes (as well as an amped vision range) to spider heads or legs.
Dean Thomas and the Curse of Jumanji: A few camel spiders the size of cats come out of the game in Hagrid's hut. Hagrid, of course, is very pleased.
The Fall: The world of Fallout is home to no shortage of these. On her first day on Earth, Louise encounters Bloatflies and a scorpion roughly her own size. On her second day, an even bigger scorpion chases her into Goodpsprings, requiring a few people to put it down. On her third day, she hears of Cazadors, giant tarantula hawk-wasps that have infested the road north of the town. Sunny warns that their venom is not something you want to be hit with, considering they were capable of downing a full grown man before they mutated.
Ice and Fire (Minecraft): Myrmex are giant ants that live in jungles. Workers are just the size of pigs; queens are several times larger than players.
It's Over, Isn't It (it's only just begun): Centipeder, a Pro Hero at Sir Nighteye's agency, has the chitin-covered head and body of a centipede.
The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World: Encountered by the four in Gothmarik Citadel. Specifically, giant centipedes — a whole roomful of the nasty things, swarming around a treasure chest. ("Oh GOD, it's like a fuckin' ocean of legs! I'm gonna have crawly things in me nightmares forever!") As the four are Actual Pacifists and squashing them isn't an option (thereby defying this trope), George turns into a brass dragon and puts them to sleep so the others can move them aside.
Ladybird (Worm): Taylor's magic can create insects significantly larger than normal, like roaches a foot long and bumblebees the size of tennis balls.
The Legend of Total Drama Island: The scene where Lindsay is "cornered" replaces the canon cockroach with a large stag beetle — "harmless, but looking like something straight out of Hell." When Lindsay speaks of the incident a few days later, she innocently makes her "rescue" sound like "a pitched battle against a thousand-kilo, armor plated killing machine".
Past Sins: The scorpiuses, gigantic, scorpion-shaped living-constellations, are among the Everfree monsters that attack Ponyville in the climax.
Prehistoric Park Reimagined: Several animals from prehistoric times that qualify (particularly from the Carboniferous Period) are amongst the lucky animals rescued. Downplayed however in that several of them, particularly the Arthropleura, end up losing their fear factor as a result of their massive size rather than getting their fear factor enhanced by it.
Principal Celestia Hunts the Undead: Donut Joe's once got attacked by 200-pound ants, which burrowed up from the earth. Celestia's group stopped them.
Realistic Pokémon: Bug-type Pokémons are obviously portrayed as such, but more surprisingly, Giratina is depicted as a massive arthropod, Celebi as a medium-sized insect, and Frosslass as a large mosquito-like bug.
Tiny Sapient Ungulates: The changelings are interpreted as pony-sized Four Legged Insects that evolved to mimic ponies' appearance.
The Weaving Force opens with Taylor and Victoria finding themselves in the depths of Kashyyyk. Taylor quickly demonstrates why having bug control on a planet where bugs are the size of small cars is a very scary thing.
The Weaver Option: The bug-controlling parahuman Taylor Hebert finding all sorts of large and nasty insects to use against her enemies as she travels the Imperium of Man. When her forces end up trapped on the Death Star, the Mechanicus brings out the samples they had kept stored because they were too dangerous; soon after, Taylor is riding some of her new bugs. Coloner Erzin's Txacopec 1st Cavalry ends up riding Helspiders into battle, after their original mounts are slain.
The World of the Creatures has a colony of giant talking spiders in Chapter 8. A lot more almost certainly exist elsewhere in the world.

Film — Animated

Giant pill bugs are served as food in The Emperor's New Groove. Giant isopods really do exist in real life but are only found in the deep ocean.
The title character in A Monster in Paris is a flea that had been enlarged in a lab accident.
Creepy crawlies don't come any bigger (or cuter) than the 350-ft. tall Insectosaurus from Monsters vs. Aliens.
Aaaaaaaa aaaaagh!
Wreck-It Ralph: The Cy-Bugs are pretty huge, with some being as big as Ralph (he's nine feet tall, by the way) or slightly bigger. The biggest bug of all is the Big Bad's Cy-Bug form; he appears to be eighteen feet tall at the very least.

Film — Live-Action

Demonic Possession movies play with this fear as well. The way that a possessed person moves is often very insect-like, as are the chirping/growling noises they make.
In Absentia, the creature which terrorizes the protagonist's family is a giant insect of some kind (we never get a clear enough view of it) which lives in Another Dimension accessible through the walls of a bridge underpass tunnel.
Beginning of the End is a 1957 film about giant grasshoppers attacking Chicago.
Big Ass Spider! is mostly about, well, this really big spider running amok in LA, but The Stinger reveals that a giant cockroach is attacking the Statue of Liberty.
The Black Scorpion is a 1957 film about giant prehistoric scorpions released by a volcanic eruption in Mexico.
Its nonsensical title aside, the Canadian Alien cash-in Blue Monkey deals with giant insects running amok in an Abandoned Hospital.
City of Ember has some oversized insects, probably to illustrate the effects of radiation on the wildlife.
Both the original Clash of the Titans and the 2010 remake feature a pair of giant scorpions.
The human-sized ectoparasites that drop off the rampaging Kaiju in Cloverfield resemble some kind of sea louse.
The Deadly Mantis has a...well, a giant Praying mantis 150ft long that flies at Supersonic speeds.
Deep Star Six features a giant eurypterid.
The prawns of District 9 are giant walking cockroaches with some resemblance to crustaceans, and are supposed to be named after the Parktown prawn, a kind of giant cricket.
Similarly, Eight Legged Freaks is about an army of spiders the size of horses that terrorize a small town. The movie is an explicit homage to the genre's movies from the 1950s, like the aforementioned Them!.
1977's Empire Of The Ants loosely adapted H. G. Wells' short story about intelligent ants taking over South America, but enlarged the ants to the size of pickup trucks to make it a straight monster flick rather than an insectile Alien Invasion story.
Legion from the Gamera series is the biggest one by far, it's also a silicon based alien.
Godzilla:
- Rodan actually begins with giant dragonfly nymphs known as Meganulon menacing the humans before the titular pterosaur shows up. The Meganulon would later appear in Godzilla vs. Megaguirus, in both nymph and winged imago form (known as Meganula), before Godzilla faces off against the eponymous Meganulon queen.
- Son of Godzilla introduces Kamacuras, a giant mutant mantis who shows up from time to time as the Magikarp of Kaiju, as well as the Giant Spider Kumonga.
- The Return of Godzilla has a type of giant sea lice known as Shockirus, which were mutated by feeding on Godzilla's radioactive blood. At five feet long, they were certainly large enough to be a threat to humans, even if not quite Kaiju-sized.
- And there's Mothra, probably the most popular insect Kaiju out there.
- And Mothra's evil twin Battra, Megaguirus the demonic dragonfly, Megalon the drill-armed stag beetle, Ebirah the rock-throwing red shrimp, and Ganimes the mutated rock crabs (as you can probably see, Godzilla and co. have certainly run the gamut for giant arthropod diversity).
- The unmade sequel to Godzilla (1998) would have involved Godzilla fighting off a horde of giant mutant termites, led by a gigantic winged queen dubbed the "Queen Bitch".
- Godzilla (2014): The "MUTOs" resemble large insects. Additionally, the Teaser Trailer Monster (a monster from a trailer but which never actually appeared in the movie) resembles a gigantic centipede or a tardigrade.
- Seen briefly in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) is a kaiju known as Scylla that resembles a six-legged Giant Spider with a squid face, as well as a Freeze-Frame Bonus of a Giant Spider nesting in the walls inside Mothra's temple at the beginning.
- As Kong is running across the lava fields in the Hollow Earth during Godzilla vs. Kong, he disturbs numerous crab-like creatures (dubbed "Rock Critters" in concept art) that were hiding amongst the crags. They're small in comparison to Kong, but concept art shows they're about the size of a bus.
The ant and the scorpion in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids are normal-sized, but due to our protagonists being miniaturized, end up having the appearance of Big Creepy Crawlies onscreen.
Hungerford is about the population of the titular town being taken over by bugs the size of shoes that burrow into their head through the back of their neck and seizing control of their body.
Giant locusts genetically engineered engineered from prehistoric ones are part of Jurassic World Dominion ‘s plot.
The giant insects in the King Kong (2005) remake qualify, though the sequence was inspired by a Deleted Scene from the 1933 original which is currently a Lost Episode (though a period-faithful recreation of the sequence by Peter Jackson and co. can be found). Most were bizarre spider/crab or gut parasite/bloodworm Mix And Match Creatures, but the giant wetas were jumbo-sized versions of actual New Zealand insects.
Men in Black: The first movie's villain is a human-sized cockroach alien seeking to conquer the Earth.
The Mimic series has the Judas Breed, a species of man-sized, bipedal cockroaches that live underground and prey on humans. It's noted that their large size is possible because they have evolved lungs as a result of genetic tampering to accelerate the lifespan of experimental cockroaches.
They're smaller than most of these examples, but the scarabs in The Mummy are bigger, and more bloodthirsty, than ordinary scarabs.
Mysterious Island has giant bees, and a giant crab.
In Princess of Mars, Mars is not only home to Giant Spiders, but also swarms of giant wasp-like insects, one of which plays a major role in the climax.
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger has a giant wasp.
Them!, a classic nuclear monster movie about giant ants.
Ticks has bigger-than-normal wood ticks due to pollution. Late in the film one giant-sized also appears.

Literature

Animorphs:
- The Taxxons, man-sized (or bigger) alien creatures resembling fleshy centipedes and with a ravenous appetite (to the point where they'll eat their own severed parts).
- The larval stage of the Skrit Na looks like a giant cockroach.
They are a common category of roaming monster in uncivilized areas in The Balanced Sword, including the dreaded doomlock spiders, and a kind of giant carnivorous caterpillar thing.
Bruce Coville's Book of...:
- Bruce Coville's Book of Monsters II: The titular monster in George Pinkerton and the Bloodsucking Fiend of Brokentree Swamp turns out to be a human-sized leech which grew to its current disgusting size through mutation and irradiation from a nearby nuclear plant.
- Bruce Coville's Book of Nightmares II: In The Shadow Wood, while traveling through the titular forest, one of the obstacles the hero faces and defeats is a pack of giant wildcat-sized ants.
The Chi, neon-yellow arthropodoids, and Knnn, hairy black arachnoids, in the Chanur Novels.
Chrysalis (RinoZ) has giant ants as the protagonists. Specifically, Anthony gets the chance to Reincarnate in Another World as a monster ant, and proceeds to track down his colony and uplift them to approximately human intelligence. The hatchlings are about a metre long, but they can grow 50% larger each time they evolve to a higher tier; Anthony is soon the size of a minibus. They prefer not to pick fights with anyone who doesn't attack them first, though.
The Fantastic Noir Monster Mash City of Devils series has been hinting at giant ants as a new kind of livestock. The fourth installment, A Stitch In Crime confirms this, showing the rantches where the ants are raised.
Most of the Vord from Codex Alera, though the Vord Queen has a degree of Voluntary Shapeshifting and gradually changes from one of these to a Cute Monster Girl (though her personality never gets any more human, which makes her creepy).
In Lindsay Gutteridge's Cold War in a Country Garden and its two sequels, Matthew Dilke is a quarter of an inch tall and meets up with regular sized ants, etc. At one point he grabs and cooks some cockroach eggs. At his size a cockroach might seem about 30 feet long.
The Dark Tower has four-foot crustaceans crawling around one beach that resemble hideous mutant lobsters and are casually referred to as "lobstrosities." They constantly mutter noises that sound almost like they're speaking, although they seem to be mindless predators that eat anything or anyone who's unable to run away. Later it's discovered that they are themselves delicious.
Underplayed in The Dinosaur Lords, when Melodía mentions offhandedly that the fireflies from which the Imperial Palace takes its name are a metre long. It also features giant dragonflies, which seem to fill a similar ecological niche to medium-sized birds of prey-including being used for hunting.
In Eat Them Alive, a mentally unbalanced ex-con exacts vengeance upon his former partners in crime with a horde of giant killer praying mantises. The entire book is nothing but page after page of giant mantises rampaging and eating people.
Ender's Game uses this with the bug-like species systematically killing the crew of a human starship because, aside from the queens, their own species doesn't have free will, and they just assumed we'd be the same way. Subverted in that the bugs have bones, and that they're actually quite a nice and sympathetic, even naive (if occasionally creepy) species.
The giant alien insect species, Hetwan, in Everworld.
Hender's Island in Fragment is populated mainly by giant killer crustaceans related to mantis shrimp. This includes tractor-sized predators on land and Tyrannosaurus-sized ones in the island's lake. However, many are hardly recognizable as arthropods because hundreds of millions of years of evolution have turned many into mammal-like shapes. Pandemonium in the titular sequel plays this more straight, with colonies of hippo-sized amphipods, centipede chains made up of interlinking arthropods, and sea spiders.
Zigzagged in the short story "giANTS" by Edward Bryant. An Intrepid Reporter uncovers evidence that the American and Brazilian governments are working together to cover something up, and various clues — not least of which being increased interest in the movie Them! among the involved parties — make her suspect that an army of giant mutant ants has arisen in South America, and that, like the fire ants and killer bees before them, they're on their way north. She manages to track down a scientist who seems to be connected to the whole thing, but he tells her that there are no giant mutant ants — yet. He then explains to her what's actually going on. It turns out that something — possibly a radiation leak from a nearby power station — has messed up the life cycle of a swarm of army ants, permanently locking them into their nomadic phase. They're no bigger than other ants of their species, but they're more active, more aggressive and hungrier, and have the power to devastate the ecosystem in their path. Oh, and thanks to incautious use of insecticide over the years, they're resistant to every one available. Fortunately, the project he's part of has come up with an unconventional solution: a mutagen which will, indeed, cause the ants to grow enormous... which will inevitably kill them as their bodies can no longer carry their own weight. It works.
The Gone series by Michael Grant has the bugs from Plague.
The main antagonists in Grasshopper Jungle are giant, bulletproof praying mantises.
Hothouse: The surviving insects of the far future — tree-bees, plantants, tigerflies, and termights — have grown much larger and more fearsome than their forebears, matching the shrinking future humans until they both reach roughly the same sizes.
Subverted in Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth books, in which the insectoid Thranx are the principal allies of humankind. Not that the formation of this alliance went through without some problems (of the xenophobic terrorist variety).
In the Incarnations of Immortality novel On a Pale Horse, Zane, the incarnation of Death, faces a gigantic demonic preying^sic mantis.
InCryptid:
- Apraxis wasps are parasitic Wicked Wasps the size of a shoe.
- In the alien dimension Sarah, Annie, Artie, James, and Mark end up in at the end of Imaginary Numbers, there are train-sized centipedes and millipedes that fly through the sky, and a giant Slaying Mantis and Giant Spiders show up after dark. Antimony and Sarah speculate on how they manage to avoid the Square-Cube Law, theorizing that they have lungs instead of tracheae, like Earth insects do.
In Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach, James befriends a group of insects living on the eponymous enormous fruit who have become human-sized and anthropomorphic as a result of the same magic that created the giant peach.
In Jurassic Park, giant dragonflies described as having a six-foot wingspan (presumably cloned Meganeura) appear briefly in the aviary (without explanation given for their presence, considering they are from before the evolution of mosquitoes and thus couldn't be cloned by using the blood in the ones preserved in amber like what had been done with other prehistoric animals).
Killer Species: Book 3 introduces the Blood Jackets, a hybrid species of baldface hornet and vampire bat, made to target and kill humans. They're about as big as the normal bats, and are very dangerous to those they attack... though the vast genetic differences result in them being relatively and naturally short-lived.
Most of the monsters in the Kingdom's Disdain sequence are giant insects, arachnids, or other creepy-crawlies. They seem to be a favorite of the Rot Lord.
In the German SF series Maddrax the setting is a post-apocalyptic world in which the animals have mutated into huge monsters. Especially the insects have become very big.
Maggots by Edward Jarvis is Exactly What It Says on the Tin; humanity is plagued by a horde of maggots. Mostly, the maggots are of ordinary size (it's just that there's just a lot of them), but a few are absolutely disgustingly gigantic.
Subverted in Michael Crighton's Micro. The bugs are actually normal size, it's the humans who have been shrunk down to half an inch. At one point one character is drawn and quartered by ants.
Ransom briefly encounters a giant fly and giant beetles in the caves of Venus in Perelandra. He's initially quite terrified at their appearance, but they prove to be no threat, and his fear quickly subsides.
Scorpions (2016) by Mike Cook features a horde of giant prehistoric Scary Scorpions unleashed from underground after an earthquake in Nevada.
Scorpion: Second Generation, the sequel to Michael R. Linaker's Scorpion (1980), has the killer scorpions from the first book return, except this time they've been mutated into giants by radiation.
Shadows of the Apt: Giant insects fill the niche in the ecosystem that mammals do in our world.
Starship Troopers: Robert A. Heinlein used such bugs as a metaphor for Communism. They have a Brain Caste of very smart individuals and the warriors are as smart as they need to be to fight effectively, but the workers are relatively mindless and instinct-driven. Which actually works pretty well as a metaphor for the USSR.
Star Wars: Convergence: The scorpions of Eiram are about the size of a human head.
The initially tiny ants in the Still More Tales to Give You Goosebumps story Awesome Ants gradually develop into this after a boy ignores the instruction manual for his new ant farm and starts overfeeding them. By the ending they've reached the size of mountains, and locked up all humans in town-sized ant farms.
The Stormlight Archive: Virtually all wildlife in the world of Roshar is insectoid or crustacean. This is because Roshar gets one of the hypercane-like highstorms every few days, so only things that can weather repeated scourings can survive. Some of them are Kaiju sized or even big enough to be mistaken for islands. According to Word of God and Arcanum Unbounded they dodge the Square-Cube Law through a combination of lighter gravity, higher oxygen content, and magic.
Super Minion: Giant size is a common superpower/mutation for small animals to develop. The tropics are a constant warzone against giant bugs, especially army ants.
Survival in Another World with My Mistress!: Gizma, native to the Great Omitt Badlands between the Black Forest and occupied Merinard, resemble truck-sized man-eating grasshoppers. The first major battle of the series consists of the villagers and Kousuke exterminating a swarm of them that attacks the village.
The Taking: One of the creatures encountered by the protagonists is a massive bug hiding in a church basement whose features are a mashup of insects, spiders and scorpions. It drags one guy into its lair and messily kills him in the shadows followed by spearing another guy on its stinger.
Time Machine Series: In Search for Dinosaurs, you meet some impressively large dragonflies in the Triassic period.
Tolkien's Legendarium: J. R. R. Tolkien has a cartload of these, including Ungoliant (The Silmarillion), Shelob (The Lord of the Rings) and the Mirkwood spiders (The Hobbit)
Worm has Atlas, a gigantic Hercules beetle created by Panacea and controlled by Skitter that was capable of supporting a human in flight.
The Worms by Al Sarrantonio: Giant worms (created by a witch) plague the New England town of Province, but with a twist! Anyone the worms prick with their tail stingers turn into giant worms themselves. Were-worms!

Live-Action TV

The ants from The Aquabats! Super Show! episode "Manant!" fall under this trope, as does the potato bug in "Pilgrim Boy!".
Babylon 5:
- The first season featured occasional appearances by N'Grath, a crime-lord who looked like a giant praying mantis.
- The Shadows are five foot tall spider people, a form also suggested by their spacecraft.
The she-mantis in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Teacher's Pet" and the giant bugs in Angel's "Fredless".
In The Bush Tucker Man, Major Les Hiddins tells how in Australia's Northern Territory they talk of a mosquito so big it landed at Alice Springs Airport and was filled with a hundred gallons of aviation fuel before they realised what it was. Les finds it all rather unlikely. "I've never seen a mosquito that big. Ninety gallons yeah, but not a hundred."
Doctor Who:
- The classic series has "The Web Planet" and "Planet of the Spiders", among others. The queen spider was larger than a double-decker bus, man... Eugh.
- "The Runaway Bride" has the Giant Spider Racnoss Empress.
- "Utopia" has Chantho, an extremely nice humanoid insect alien. Jack Harkness (unsurprisingly) flirts with her.
- "The Unicorn and the Wasp" has a human-sized alien wasp. When Donna says she ran into a giant wasp, she doesn't mean big, she means FLIPPING ENORMOUS!
- "Kill the Moon" has giant bacteria creatures, which look like spiders, on the Moon-egg.
- "Arachnids in the UK" has spiders that were descended from an improperly-disposed-of test subject, modified to live longer, which consequently grew huge by eating garbage. The smallest are the size of dinner plates.
- "It Takes You Away": The "antizone" between the two mirror-portals is home to flesh-moths the size of large rats, which eat any kind of meat they can get to.
The Insects from Lexx are wood lice as big as a small planet. The Lexx itself is an insectoid Living Ship the size of Manhattan.
A staple of Klaus Von Steinhauer's plans in Monster Warriors. Aside from the Giant Spider, other giant creepy-crawlies he unleashed on Capital City include: a bumblebee (Buzz!"); an earthworm ("The Terror Underground"); a carnivorous butterfly ("Attack of the Carnivorous Butterfly"); a slug ("Capital City vs. the Plant Thing"); cockroaches ("Terror of the Giant Cockroaches"); a praying mantis ("Marauding Mantis" and "Terror at the Drive-In"); termites ("Termites"); a ladybug ("Attack of the Enormous Terrifying Ladybug"); stinkbugs ("Attack of the Stinkbugs: Parts I and II"); leeches (Attack of the Leaping Leeches"); and ants ("Trick or Treat").
Power Rangers had insect and arachnid based Monsters of the Week up the yin-yang. In the first season alone, there was Spidertron, Weaveworm, Fighting Flea, Mantis, and Grumble Bee. The second season... Well, listing all of them would take too long, but suffice to say, bug-like monsters were popular among the villains.
While made by the same company, Prehistoric Park actually subverts this despite having giant bugs. Head Keeper Bob actually prefers that Arthropleura is a man sized millipede, as it's too big to actually sneak up on you and be scary. He outright calls it a proper animal.
Primeval has several appearance of giant arthropods and worms. The spin-off, Primeval: New World, also has a few nasty critters in it, namely the giant Jurassic beetles from "Fear of Flying".
Red Dwarf has the Psirens, a form of GELF who resembled giant human-sized assassin bugs and who used illusions to lure and suck out their victim's brains.
Stargate:
- Stargate SG-1: In "Bane", SG-1 once encountered giant alien bugs that tried to turn Teal'c into a nest for more bugs. Long story.
  Hammond: [listening to dozens of impacts on the Stargate's iris] What is that?
  O'Neill: [uncharacteristically panicked] Those are bugs, sir! Really! Big! Bugs!
- Stargate Universe: This is the show's pride and joy. They've had giant spiders, chestbursters, and a dinosaur.
Bug kaiju are quite plentiful in the Ultra Series. Some notable examples include:
- Antlar, a hybrid of a stag beetle and an ant-lion from the original Ultraman is one of the eponymous hero's most iconic foes. He's super tough to kill thanks to his insanely durable exoskeleton and also possesses the ability to breathe a beam of magnetic energy that can pull a plane out of the sky.
  - Ultraman's final enemy was Zetton, an alien kaiju resembling a faceless humanoid beetle. Weirdly enough, its title is "Space Dinosaur".
  - Kiyla from the original series resembled a mix of a woodlouse and a dinosaur with literal Glowing Eyes of Doom.
- Aribunta from Ultraman Ace is inspired by ants (ari is Japanese for "ant") and has the ability to breathe acid and shoot fire from its claws.
- Ultraman Dyna foe Sildron is a mutant insect that possesses the ability to see into the future, allowing it to instantly know its enemy's next attack and counter with its Attack Reflector.
- Ultraman Nexus liked this trope with its Space Beasts, including Bugbuzun (a gross mix of a cicada, a cockroach, and a locust with an Overly-Long Tongue and wings), Grantella (a scorpion-crab mix that shoots lasers from its stinger tail), and Banpira (a Giant Spider that produces fog to hide its presence and can erase memories of its existence).
- Insectas from Ultraman Mebius resembles a a stag beetle-rhinoceros beetle hybrid. It can command swarms of normal-sized insects to swarm foes. The suit possesses six legs with the actor's arms hidden in the pincers, instead of the usual Four-Legged Insect design used for Ultra Series bug kaiju.
The Monster of the Week in The X-Files episode "Folie a Deux" is a giant insectoid... thing of some sort. It's hard to say what it actually is, as it moves so quickly and continuously that there's no way to get a good look at it. This was the result of the FX team desperately trying to hide how bad the suit looked, but not being able to keep it in sight makes the creature all the more disturbing.

Magazine

Analog:
- The January 1930 cover has four beetles the size of human beings fighting with two men and a woman in a desert.
- The May 1931 cover has an enormous bug-like creature, attacking a group of three humans, each of which is roughly the size of one of its eyes.

Music

The Creature Feature song "The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth", being that's it's a Filk Song of Them!.
An unusually intelligent and benevolent example from the Happiness Stan cycle on The Small Faces' psychedelia Concept Album Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake. A fly offers Stan a favour in return for a share of his meat pie; Stan is able to make the fly huge in order to transport him on his quest.

Mythology and Religion

Beelzebub, the aptly named "Lord of the Flies" and Patron Demon of Gluttony, is often depicted as a gigantic flying insect◊. The name is also an alternate name for Satan. Some writers take the less cool option that Beelzebub is just a nickname for Satan comparing him to a pile of dung that attracts flies (hence "Lord of the Flies").
Greek mythology has the myrmekes, giant ants attracted to precious metals that hoard treasure in Indian deserts. Legend has it that locals take courageous hit-and-run raids of their gold stores, giving them vast wealth.
The Voyage of Máel Dúin: The first unknown island seen by the voyagers after being carried off into the western ocean is overrun by giant ants, "each of them the size of a foal". At the approach of the ship, the ants gather at the strand and try to swim toward the ship, making the voyagers flee in terror.

Pinball

True to the source, the Bugs in Starship Troopers all easily dwarf a typical Mobile Infantry human.

Podcasts

In The Adventure Zone: Balance, Magnus and Merle end up fighting a cockroach while shrunk. Later, (back to regular size), they fight giant tardigrades.
Trials & Trebuchets:
- Golapedra, the Second Eldest of the Plane of Isathil, is a centipede the length of a city block.
- The party face off against a Retriever, a robotic Giant Spider, during the Autumn's End duels.
- Enormous, centipede-like monsters called Remorhaz stalk the frozen waters around the city of Troisle.
Briefly mentioned in the Relative Disasters episode when describing the life forms that lived during the late Cretaceous period.

Tabletop Games

Arduin: Blue bellowers are beetles the size of elephants.
Ars Magica: The Pests of a Colossal Size spell turns turns fleas, ticks, mites, etc. present upon a target into very large versions of themselves.
Bleak World has Wereroaches, which are one of the only two werbeasts that can change at will (the other being werewolves). Their beast form is a six foot tall cockroach, and it is repeatedly noted that they are likely the strongest breed of werebeast, having the ability to fly and lift hundreds of times their own weight.
The Book of Unremitting Horror: Torture dogs resemble giant mammalian cyborg weevils, with whirring power drills between their oversized, prehensile mandibles.
Dungeons & Dragons:
- Numerous giant insects have appeared over the years, including bees, wasps, and ticks, as well as creatures like the manscorpion (a race of Scorpion People) and the formians, a race of Law-aligned Outsiders in the form of human-sized ants.
- Dark Sun: The thri-kreen are a desert-dwelling nomadic race of mantis-men. Many of them have psionic abilities.
- The Hivebrood are a version from Basic/Expert/etc D&D which doubles as The Virus.
- Araneas are giant (4ft long, 2ft wide) spiders originally introduced in Mystara. They're fully sapient, smarter than the average human, naturally adept at magic, and therianthrope-style shapeshifters, with a single inherent humanoid form as well as a natural spider form. Also, they're not Always Chaotic Evil but typically Neutral, admittedly tending towards being arrogant, manipulative jerkasses. In fact, they're an official player race in the Red Steel subsetting.
- Umber hulks are towering beetle monsters whose hulking build and powerful arms are backed up by a magical confusion gaze.
- Ankhegs are large burrowing insects that look a bit like giant rove beetles and are able to spew acid from their mandibles.
- Gloomwings are giant predatory moths from the Plane of Shadow with swirling hypnotic patterns on their wings. Their caterpillars, known as Tenebrous Worms, are even bigger and more ferocious than them, possessing venomous quills composed of a shadowy substance.
- Epic Level Handbook: Vermiurges resemble dragonfly-winged scorpions in the same size range as giants.
The End of the World: In the "Skitter" scenario, several meteor strikes bring forth a race of horse-sized alien ants known as Myrmidons. They quickly overrun Earth, cutting down forests, tunneling beneath cities, and capturing humans for food in their mountain-sized mounds.
Godforsaken:
- Krao control 2.5m long ant-like insects as mounts and guardians, and employ 1-foot (30 cm) long insect builders to build tunnel-ridden mounds of hardened earth.
- Aarak are beetle-like insects that range from the size of a large dog to that of a small horse.
GURPS: The Ungeziefer from Urban Magic is a pitiable version of this. Formerly humans they're now giant cockroaches suffering from chronic depression.
Monsterpocalypse has the Savage Swarm, which are giant radioactive bugs the destroy anything that has bright lights.
Paranoia has the Giant Radioactive Mutant Cockroaches, at least in the goofier styles of play.
Rocket Age: Venus has many species of giant insects including ants, the Trip Line Spider, giant dragonflies and wasps. Some of the small ones are even worse.
Planebreaker: Vux and nux are reminiscent of blood-red giant wasps or hornets. Vux are six feet long and have venomed stingers as one might expect; nux spray acid instead and are eight feet long.
Rangers of Shadow Deep: Giant giant spiders and flies are a common enemy in many scenarios.
Rocket Age: Venus is home to many species of giant arthropods, including giant ants, spiders, dragonflies and wasps.
Shadowrun: Insect spirits are incorporeal entities that possess people and turn their hosts into a human (or dwarf, elf, ork or troll)-sized mixture of humanoid and arthropod.
The Strange:
- Cataclyst roaches are human-sized roaches with human faces. Similarly oversized roaches inhabit the Crater in the outskirts of New Centropolis, over the ruins of the old Centropolis.
- Some insects in Mesozoica are large enough to challenge a T. rex.
Talislanta has a ton of freakish fantastic versions, such as flying leeches, snap-jawed worms, and hive-dwelling semi-humanoid scorpions.
Tech Infantry: The larger castes of Bugs can be easily fifty feet tall.
They Came From Beneath The Sea!:
- Aquatepillars are massive, multicolored sea slug-like creatures ranging from 10 feet long and 3 feet in diameter to 30 feet long and 12 feet in diameter. They are slow but relentless predators that attempt to slam into potential meals (aka, anything made of flesh) in order to paralyze them with the venomous hairs adorning their bodies before devouring their prey. They have voracious appetites and whilst capable of feeding on plantlife, they prefer flesh.
- The Primordials known as Bonellia Viridis Terribilis are literally spoonworms, a real-world aquatic invertebrate, grown large enough to feed on humans.
- The Gigantic Pillbugs are humanoid shaped and man-sized marine isopods.
Wanderhome: Bugs serve as the pets, livestock, and wild creatures of Hæth, so they are accordingly large. Unlike most depiction of giant bugs, they are supposed to be less creepy and more cuddly.
Warhammer:
- Warhammer 40,000:
  - The original concept of the Tyranids was insects crossed with dinosaurs and while their look has developed more towards the latter they still retain a number of insectoid elements such as a Hive Mind, swarms, Queens and their six limbs.
  - Catachan Devils, a species of gigantic centipede-like alien with scorpion attributes.
- Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Alarielle the Everqueen, Goddess of Life, rides into battle on the back of a Wardroth Beetle, a giant-sized combination of a stag beetle and a Hercules beetle.
- Warhammer Fantasy: The Forest Goblins frequently use giant spiders the size of St. Bernards as cavalry, as well as some the size of moving vans for their shamans and bosses to ride to war on. They also have Arachnarok Spiders, which carry catapults on their backs and are so big Games Workshop had to come up with a custom base for the model.
Werewolf: The Forsaken:
- The Nidmuzug, or, more plainly, the Unclean. Humans who ate food contaminated by the spiritual taint that all Nidmuzugs emit and found themselves turning into werecockroaches. Their hybrid form is a giant, humanoid cockroach that can have a poisonous bite or claw attack. Their "beast form" is a swarm of hundreds of cockroaches, all controlled by a single mind. Interestingly, they come off as quite miserable rather than scary. They lose absolutely none of their humanity in the whole Body Horror process, and they can't live among humans since light hurts their eyes. The elders eventually become estranged from their human sides, but given the general misery that is their existence, it seems more like Unclean who survive to that point used the logic of "You know what? Fuck you, I am a monster!"
- Then there's the more conventional creepies, like the Azlu, or Spider Hosts. They're spiritual parasites who infiltrate human bodies, consume the brain, and turn the body into a puppet. They can turn into giant spiders at will, and are almost singularly dedicated to strengthening the barrier between Earth and the Hisil... which you'd think would be a good thing, but with less traffic between Earth and the Hisil, things start to get spiritually barren on this side of existence, leading to general turmoil.
The Witcher: Game of Imagination: Just to name few out of a rather big bunch there are scorpions in size of a cow, crab-spiders able to chop your leg with their pincers and ygherns, centipedes measured in meters. As a whole, they a;; have have strong carapaces, most of them are poisonous and all of them are always hungry. Oh, and they are the only creatures immune to the Chunky Salsa Rule.
World Tree (RPG): Some creatures resemble outsized arthropods of various sorts. Zonn, for instance, are essentially grasshoppers the size of cattle.
The Yellow King: Slitherers look like three- to four-foot-long myriapods with gnarled carapaces.

Toys

BIONICLE:
- Many of the rahi qualify, such as the Nui Jaga (giant scorpion) and Nui Rama (giant wasp-like creature).
- The Visorak, an army of giant intelligent spiders.

Video Games

An Egyptian player that chooses to worship Sekhmet during the Heroic Age in Age of Mythology can train Scarabs as a myth unit; they are dung beetles, but HUGE. And instead of dung, they prefer to eat buildings, essentially making them living siege weapons.
Aka Manto: You can encounter a centipede the size of a snake crawling through the vents.
Alice in Wonderland (2010): The Mushroom Forest is populated with gigantic mosquitoes.
In ARK: Survival Evolved, they're probably the second most plentiful creatures after dinosaurs, from pony-sized spiders and scorpions to dragonflies and ants the size of dogs. Most of them can also be domesticated.
Bangai-O: In Bangai-O Spirits and Missile Fury, one of the enemy types that you face off with are giant ants (of varying sizes). For no particular reason.
Banjo-Kazooie: The first game features Tickers (large pink termites), Buzzbombs (large yellow dragonflies) and Scabbies (large, rounded flying scarabs colored black and yellow). The Tickers can be found in Mumbo's Mountain and the Christmas tree of Freezeezy Peak, the Buzzbombs appear in Bubblegloop Swamp and the autumn period of Click Clock Wood, the Scabbies appear in Gobi's Valley, and all three of them roam the entrances to their respective levels in Gruntilda's Lair. Click Clock Wood also has the Zubbas, which fall under Wicked Wasps.
Battleborn: There are the Swarmers which are bug-like creatures native to the planet of Ekkunar and the moon of Bliss. These indigenous enemies per their name are known for swarming in large numbers and being a general nuisance for the Battleborn. They come in two types. There's the regular type that is relatively small in size for a giant bug and easy to kill but capable of high damage especially in large numbers. Then there's the swollen type which are larger and tougher than their smaller counterparts but aren't as aggressive, relying instead on spawning tiny Swarmers to attack targets.
Bayonetta: Several of the Infernal Demons summoned by the titular character of the series are enormous creepy crawlies. There's Phantasmaraneae, a Giant Spider that lives in the magma pools of Inferno, and also Scolopendra, a demonic centipede that makes it's home in a river of boiling blood and is stated to grow up to six miles long! Both of these huge creepy crawlies make a return in the sequel, only this time as enemies instead of as summonable allies.
Bio-Hazard Battle: Tons of them abound in the game, which takes place after a virus causes a planet's lifeforms to grow to massive proportions.
In The Binding of Isaac, there are lots of maggots in various sizes and levels of threat.
The main enemies of Body Harvest are giant alien locusts — in fact, the average ones are about your character's size.
Bubble and Squeak: The first enemies in the game are big-eyed cute-looking bugs that are as big as a small dog.
Bug! has insectoid Mooks the same size as the titular character, but it is subverted as the player character himself is a bug. Then you see the ending, which shows that Bug and the insectoid enemies (who are actually actors) are about half the size of a human!
Bugs vs. Tanks probably qualifies. All the bugs in the game are normal sized... you're just really tiny.
Chip's Challenge has yellow-colored bugs (the exact species isn't confirmed, but their sprites are based on bumblebees so they're likely that) which walk around walled areas in a counterclockwise pattern. Like all mooks present in the game, they're as large as Chip and move as fast as he does, so dealing with them isn't always an easy task. These bugs also appear frequently in all fan sequels, but the official sequel Chip's Challenge 2 replaces them with orange-colored ants, which retain the same behavior.
Many of the native alien creatures in Civilization: Beyond Earth resemble giant bugs. Wolf Beetles are the size of Terran wolves and exhibit similar pack behaviours. Drones are wasps that are bigger than men. Raptor Bugs are even larger, the size of horses, and colonies following the Harmony affinity can breed and train them to use as mounts. The in-game encyclopaedia compares the planet's ecosystem to that of Earth during the Carboniferous period.
In the Mutant Insects game of Combat Of Giants, you play as one of them. It is also a sort of exception given that the Player Character is trying to resist the Hive Mind.
Although it probably isn't canonical (its counterpart in Tiberian Dawn wasn't), Command & Conquer: Red Alert features what the fans called 'the Secret Ant Missions', so called because it is a hidden (small) campaign about giant ants. The light-red ants shoot fireballs.
The Conduit has creepy crawlies of all sizes, but the big ones include the man-sized Drones, the eight-feet-tall Scarabs, and the tank-sized Invaders.
Conker's Bad Fur Day: Large, red-colored dung beetles inhabit the excremental mountain that is located in the east side of the Windy area, including the Poo Cabin and the inner mountain that makes up for the Sloprano area. Some of them are jerks (the first four have to be killed because they won't let Conker move onto the mountain or even the alternate path that leads to the Barn Boys area), but most are actually friendly; one of them asks you to defeat the Great Mighty Poo, who's been eating them one by one and terrorizing the survivors.
Leaving a house empty for too long in Constructor results in it being populated by an 8-foot tall cockroach that likes to walk around the neighborhood on two feet. Needless to say, the neighbors don't like them influencing their children.
Crossed Swords have giant insectoid enemies in both games, the most prominent being gigantic caterpillars that takes up an entire screen as recurring Giant Mook enemies.
Darkest Dungeon: Among the monsters you can encounter in the various dungeons are giant Maggots, two types of Giant Spider (Spitters, who spew Blight-inducing venom, and Webbers, who can slow, mark, or even stun your heroes with their webs), the worm-like Carrion Eaters found in the Warrens, and the snail-like Sea Maggots. The Crimson Court expansion adds the Bloodsuckers, which are vampires styled after mosquitoes, who look vaguely humanoid at first but will drop any pretense of humanity and become mutated, bug-like monstrosities at their first taste of blood.
Daxter: While not all Metal Bugs are terribly enormous, some (Particularly, the Altum sonatur and Stripe Mine hive queens, as well as Metal Kaeden) are significantly bigger than adult humans, let alone the titular ottsel.
The ChCh-t from the DEADLOCK series. They have a queen, pincer claws instead of hands, a scorpion tail, and all the other usual bug characteristics. They are also a playable race.
The entire point of Deadly Creatures. Well, except that the creepy crawlies are normal sized, but you're playing as them.
Devil May Cry has Beelzebubs, insects that have grown to enormous proportions as a result of possession by demons. They come in two varieties: the blue Beelzebubs that resemble flies and can spit out maggots that stop you from using guns; and the green Beelzebubs that resemble mantises.
The Insulidian Plasmid in Disco Elysium is a ten-foot tall stick insect. Unlike most examples of the trope it can communicate with something resembling telepathy, and is shy and compassionate.
Donkey Kong Country: Zingers are large bees that often serve as invincible barriers in levels, and have boss versions in multiple games. You get to explore a giant beehive, too...
Dragon's Crown: The Doom Beetle boss is a monstrous beetle more than twice the size of your characters. It's also the adult stage of human-sized giant Worms that had been mutated by magic, so failing to kill these Worms before they emerge from their cocoons during the boss battle will make you fight even more Doom Beetles. However, there's one good thing about these Giant Worms: Their meat apparently makes for good eating, to the point that in the Treasure Art where you collect Worm cocoon sample for some researchers, adventurers specifically mention the giant worms as a convenient source of protein after the inevitable happens and the giant worms escaped into the wild and began breeding unchecked.
Dyna Gear have your character being trapped on a prehistoric planet full of giant monsters. Naturally, you get harassed by oversized insects in several levels.
The Earth Defense Force series pits players against a massive army of giant ants, spiders, and wasps, supported by Humongous Mecha.
- Earth Defense Force 5: Like in previous titles a number of enemies appear to be a variety of giant mindless bugs rampaging around the area.
The Elder Scrolls:
- Giant spiders are a common enemy creature in several games in the series. They are often venomous and are capable of trapping human-sized prey in their webs (and in one case, even a woolly mammoth).
- Land Dreughs appear in several games, and are large, vicious, humanoid crabs. They are a temporary form of the typical aquatic Dreugh (who more closely resemble humanoid octopi), and come onto land to breed. They possess a natural shock attack and have been known to cocoon their victims to serve as food for their young.
- Morrowind has the Kwama family of creatures, ranging from the grub-like Kwama Foragers to the adolescent wood louse-like Scrib, to the larger Kwama Workers, Warriors, and Queens. They lay eggs which are a staple of the Dunmeri diet. Shalks are a large black beetle with natural fire magic abilities.
- Skyrim has Chaurus, which are large, corrosive acid spitting, subterranean insects often found domesticated by the Falmer, who use Chaurus chitin to craft weapons and armor. Like a cicada, when a Chaurus reaches the end of its life cycle, its body gives birth to a Chaurus Hunter, which is a more dangerous winged variety.
Etrian Odyssey: Many of the F.O.E. found in the games' strata are large, empowered insects ready to ruin the existence of whoever comes at them unprepared. Examples include the Servitor Ants (bred by the enormous Ant Queen), the Moth Lords, and the Death Mantis.
Factorio has the creatively titled bugs, which come in a variety of sizes, none of which are smaller than a man. The largest bugs are the size of a dump truck and can shrug off high-explosive rockets and flame attacks. Tiered walls, turret rings, and possibly ramming trains riding in circles around the base are necessary to prevent massed bug attacks from breaching into your factories and wreaking havoc with the delicate machinery. Bugs are made aggressive by pollution, so creating low-pollution factories inside forests can prevent them from attacking.
Fallout:
- As a result of the setting being heavily inspired by the motifs and aesthetics of Atom Punk science fiction from the fifties, the game world is crawling with a wide variety of insects and other arthropods turned gigantic by exposure to radiation, including two-foot-long Radroaches, Radscorpions that grow upwards of six feet long, Giant Ants, some of which breathe fire and others of which fly, Bloodbugs, who are giant mosquitoes that suck your blood and spit it back at you, and Stingwings, scorpionflies the size of birds of prey.
- A quest in Fallout 3 involving said fire breathing ants reveals they were given this ability by a scientist who was attempting to return them to a normal size. Naturally, things went horribly wrong.
- One of the worst of them is the Legendary Bloatfly in Fallout: New Vegas: Old World Blues, a simple Bloatfly — one of the weakest enemies in the games — the size of Beelzebub with a Sickly Green Glow around it that hits harder than some of the toughest enemies in the games.
- Cazadores break from the pattern somewhat: instead of being nuclear mutants, they originated as tarantula hawk wasps who were genetically engineered to grow to huge sizes by a Mad Scientist with nothing better to do.
- A number of Giant Enemy Crabs show up as well, such as the series-wide Mirelurks, as well as the truck-sized Hermit Crabs and two-story-tall Fog Crawlers from the Fallout 4 expansion Far Harbour. Fittingly, these tend to be the biggest creepy crawlies in the games they appear in.
In Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark you can encounter giant beetles called Bzzerks on some maps.
Common enemies if Feral Fury are gigantic, plasma-spitting flies.
Fin and the Ancient Mystery: The first enemy type Fin encounters in the game are gigantic green bugs.
Fox N Forests: Enemies in the game include insects that look roughly the size of Rick's head, and ants the size of cars. Oh, and there's also, as one boss, the GIGANTIC queen of the wasps.
FreeSpace: The bug-like Shivans overlap with Insectoid Aliens. They are intelligent and possess extremely advanced technology, and their agility and strength means they don't so much creep and crawl as leap, smash, and throw armored soldiers around like toy dolls. They may also be cybernetic, and are permanent space-dwellers since their hind legs are configured in a way that only makes sense if they habitually live in free-fall.
Furwind: The Player Character can jump into the air and perform a ground pound. It's useful for destroying obstacles that he needs to get under.
Garfield's Nightmare:
- The castle levels has large, green-colored beetles that roam across the ground; Garfield can defeat them with a basic stomp. Some big red spiders appear as well, swinging back and forth from ceilings with the help of their web threads.
- In the volcanic levels, some thick dragonflies with hummingbird-like beaks fly around and will attack Garfield upon first sight.
Giana Sisters DS: Bugs (red-bellied black beetles) and Worms (red-spiked green worms) are as large as Giana.
Guild Wars 2 features several variants of big arthropods, from the merely large to the truly gargantuan. One of the best-known varieties is the "devourer", a twin-tailed scorpion which proliferates throughout the Charr regions; these things can, especially if domesticated, grow as big as a house and can be used as mobile artillery platforms. (Devourer eggs, especially pickled ones, are considered quite the delicacy by Charr.) Sea scorpions (see the Real Life section below) are a common denizen of Tyria's salt-water seas. Overgrown spiders, mosquitoes, wasps and grubs are ubiquitous pests. On the other hand, rangers can tame juvenile spiders and devourers and adopt them as pets/companions.
The antlions in Half-Life 2.
The Halo series has Drones, who are sapient aliens that look sort of like a cross between a moth and a beetle.
Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures has giant spiders and scorpions, about as big as Indy, as the weakest enemies in the game—at the easier difficulty levels they'll barely do any damage, and it's easier to simply ignore them.
Into the Breach: Humanity's main threat are the Vek, who style themselves as giant bugs, such as scorpions, fireflies and hornets.
Kid Baby Starchild: One of the enemy types encountered in the game are giant bugs with sharp teeth.
Beetle Mania in King of the Monsters.
Kirby:
- The recurring Bugzzy enemy is a giant stag beetle that attacks with wrestling moves. It also has a counterpart called Hornhead who was introduced in Kirby: Triple Deluxe.
- Also coming from Triple Deluxe, Queen Sectonia is an Insect Queen who is the Big Bad of the main game. She soon combines herself with the Dreamstalk so she can rule all over Popstar. Her servant Taranza somewhat qualifies as well. It's implied that she wasn't always a wasp, however. In Kirby: Planet Robobot, a clone of her is fought in Meta Knightmare Returns and The True Arena. After she is defeated, she somewhat turns into a spider-like creature resembling her former friend.
In Kolibri the insects are normal-sized, but the player character is a hummingbird, so in context many of them are giants.
The Legend of Zelda:
- The Legend of Zelda: The first game in the series introduces Gohma, which would go on to grow into a family of boss monsters with a large eye as their weakness; in some games (such as Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess), there are mook versions as well. With one exception, all of them are Giant Spiders. The outlier is the incarnation in The Wind Waker, as there it's a large centipede that inhabits the lava beneath the top of Dragon Roost Island, and serves as the King Mook version of the Magtail.
- Zelda II: The Adventure of Link:
  - Boons are flies large enough to fly while carrying around good-sized rocks.
  - Dealers are Giant Spiders around Link's size.
  - Geldarms are centipedes considerably longer than Link is tall.
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: The game introduces Mothula, a very dangerous large moth that serves as the boss of Skull Woods, and has since appeared in later games (including mook versions in The Wind Waker.
- The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: There's both a dragonfly mook with an electrified tail in the Bubblegloop Swamp region at the south, and a Dual Boss of centipedes (Twinmold) in Stone Tower Temple. For the latter, it's recommended to use the Giant's Mask to attack the weak points (heads and tails) more easily.
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: The light stolen to the guardian spirits has to be retrieved by killing electric, luminiscent Shadow Bugs. Their queen is the Twilit Bloat, found in Lake Hylia.
- The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks: Stagnox is a gigantic stag beetle that charges at Link during battle, though its abdomen can be hurt. In the first phase, it's necessary to remove the surrounding poison from the abdomen; in the second phase, stunning it requires hitting the head with an explosive instead.
Lep's World: A lot of the enemies in the game are bugs just a head smaller than the Player Character.
Almost every single enemy in Let's Go Jungle: Lost On The Island Of Spice. Most of which are Giant Spiders. In fact, the only three enemies that aren't creepy crawlies of some sort are the frogs, piranhas, and the Man-Eating Plant boss.
Littlewood: Whirlybugs resemble giant spiders, but have propellers where their spinnerets would be. They're also thoroughly friendly.
Machine Hunter have giant insects as minor enemies; notably roaches larger than humans in the hospital and sewer levels, and dragonflies in the swamps.
Madagascar: The "baobab worms" which appear in Coming of Age are enormous pink caterpillars. Given their size compared to Melman, they're as large as a human.
Mass Effect: Rachni resemble a hybrid of a spider and a prawn, but the Rachni Queen appears the most buglike. You also run into klixen a few times, which are crab-bug monsters the size of a man that breathe fire, and the Leviathan are shaped rather like cuttlefish but have a semi-insectoid appearance due to their thick plates and articulated, rather than muscular, tentacles.
The Matrix: Path of Neo has six-foot tall, humanoid shaped ants that can only be killed with fire.
Many levels in Chapter 5 of Super Meat Boy are filled with large maggots. Often there are piles of them. The chapter boss itself consists of 3 of the largest maggots.
Mega Man:
- Junk Man's stage from Mega Man 7 contains several nests of cockroaches called Gockroach S.
- Quite a few Mavericks from the Mega Man X series are anthropomorphic, larger-than-normal robot creepy crawlies (Boomer Kuwanger, Morph Moth, Magna Centipede, Crystal Snail, Blast Hornet, Gravity Beetle, Web Spider, Shining Firefly, Commander Yammark, Ground Scaravich, Splash Warfly, Dark Mantis and Gravity Antonion).
Plenty of big creepy crawlies exist in the Metroid games. Even the metroids themselves have a few characteristics usually associated with bugs.
Metro: Last Light brings us the Spiderbugs, which infest some of the Metro tunnels and are so feared that a large group chasing you breaks off pursuit rather than follow you into their territory. They're roughly the size of a malamute, the males of the species have giant scorpion-like stingers on them and their upper carapaces are Immune to Bullets.
In Michigan: Report From Hell, the second report you're with can die from a big (relatively, it couldn't hide behind a beer can) scary spider if it jumps on her and bites. You can knock her out of the way, or if you see it enough it scurries off.
Mighty Aphid: The vast majority of enemies in the game are giant bugs created by Lady Bug using the powerful moon gems that she stole from Dr. Cavor.
Minecraft: Giant arthropods are the second-most prevalent type of enemies after The Undead. The most common are the player-sized Giant Spiders, but there are also dog-sized cave spiders, chicken-sized bees, and cat-sized silverfish^note. As an in-game category, they're united by their common weakness to weapons enchanted with Bane of Arthropods.
Minecraft Dungeons: The spiders from regular Minecraft are here, including the venomous Cave Spiders.
Monster Hunter has its fair share of insectoid monsters (known in-game as "Neopterons.") The small ones mostly serve as minor annoyances at worst, to the point that their bodies usually splatter upon death, meaning no carcass for you to carve parts from, but the really big ones are strong enough to serve as a Boss Battle in their own right.
- Monster Hunter (2004):
  - Hornetaur are relatively docile beetle-like small monsters that jump and try to stab you with their horns once angered.
  - Vespoids are flying wasp-like monsters that zip around erratically and possess a paralytic sting. In Freedom Unite, they're led by a Vespoid Queen.
- Monster Hunter 3 (Tri):
  - Bnahabra are similar to Vespoids, but they can also spit a corrosive goop that lowers elemental resistance based on region. Later games toned it down to "just" paralysis.
  - Altaroth are ant-like Neopterons that store items in their stretchy stomachs, then take it back to their nests and vomit it out like bees. Their bodies are even more fragile than most Neopterons; any lethal damage that isn't poison will splatter them. When their bellies are inflated, they'll drop an item upon being killed, depending on what's in them. In Rise, they may leave a corpse to carve, however.
- Monster Hunter Online: Lightenna is a truck-sized Neopteron exclusive to the Chinese-only MMO Monster Hunter Online that resembles a mix between a grasshopper and a beetle with its big horn. What's notable about it, however, are its wings. It doesn't resemble a grasshopper for nothing; when it rubs its wings together, it can generate an electromagnetic charge, which it can use to generate barriers and charge Hunters, changing who its positive and negatively charged thunder shots will target. The Poikilos subspecies, on the other hand, ditches this gimmick and instead generates Dragon energy using its wings.
- Monster Hunter 4:
  - The Seltas is a speedy large Neopteron who rams things with his horn; he can also shoot balls of water that reduce your defense. The Seltas Queen, on the other hand, is the Seltas' tank-like female counterpart, who likes to burrow, charge like a Tigrex, and can perform a devastating charged water blast. The Seltas Queen calls Seltas as her minion during battle. He can mount her and shoot Stamina-sapping water blasts like a rotary turret, and his wings allow the very heavy Seltas Queen to fly. Unfortunately for the poor Seltas, the Queen isn't too grateful for his help, as she'll slam him down onto the ground and eat him when she starts running low on stamina, then just call in another one. The two-horned Desert Seltas in 4 Ultimate has it even worse, as the Queen blasts him so hard at the pesky Hunters that he freaking explodes... upon which she'll just yank another Desert Seltas out of nowhere. Notably, their design and concept invokes the image of a Combining Mecha as well as that of a giant bug, which is also reflected in the armors you can craft with their materials.
  - Starting from this game, you can also use one, as part of a weapon, no less! The Insect Glaive is a staff-like weapon that allows you to jump super high in the air, something only one other weapon is capable of (the Lance, and only during its Dash Attack.) However, the other half of the weapon is the Kinsect, a roughly-coconut-sized insect that resides on your arm. You can command it to fly and bite monsters to leech "extracts" from them. Drinking the "extracts" the Kinsect brings back gives you several boost, up to and including boosts to Affinity, a different standard attack chain, the ability to ignore weak monster roars, immunity to some types of knockbacks, and restoring a bit of health. They start out as the weak Mauldrone or Culldrone, but by feeding them Jellies, Ambrosias, and assorted monster parts and materials, you can upgrade their stats and elemental powers to your liking.
- Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate: Ahtal-Ka is a golden mantis-esque Neopteron who builds a colossal nest out of abandoned materials with her silk, and can pick up objects bigger than she is to swing them around like an Epic Flail. However, this isn't the only notable thing about Ahtal-Ka. You see, she's called the "Empress of Ruins" for a reason. Ahtal-Ka is apparently smart enough to collect abandoned human siege materials, and then, using her silk, she builds a freaking big silk Gundam called the Ahtal-Neset with the siege materials. She then goes on to raid active human fortresses and triple the Ahtal-Neset in size. Since the shinier the specimen, the more likely they are to attract a mate, she's also very interested in shiny objects, which is why you can mine her mecha for the Golden Eggs, Platinum Eggs, Charms and various gems she stores within.
Mushroom Kingdom Fusion also has those man-sized maggots in Corpse of the Behemoth (4-7).
In The Nightmare Before Christmas: The Pumpkin King, a prequel game to The Nightmare Before Christmas, a good deal of the enemies and several of the bosses are giant insects or arachnids.
No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle: The minigame Bug Out! has Travis visit an apartment to exterminate a large group of grasshopers, bees, mice and scorpions, all of them being the same size as Travis himself if not bigger. The minigame is divided into four levels, with each one taking place in a wider room or floor than the last, and thus having more crawlies to deal with.
Northern Journey features a wide variety of big creepy crawlies, from the near-obligatory spiders to more rarely seen critters like diving beetles, ticks, and pseudoscorpions.
One Dog Story has plenty of insectoid enemies as big as the Player Character.
Overland: The game’s enemies consist of hostile, alien-like creatures known colloquially as “Bugs”. They come in many shapes and varieties, but generally appear large, black and blocky with colorful tendrils protruding out of their bodies.
The largest family of Darkers in Phantasy Star Online 2 consists of insectoids that generally don't bear much of a resemblance to any kind of real insect in particular (Some exceptions being the Gwanada, which is an antlion, and the Dicahda and Predicahda, which are mantises.) They vary in size from the knee-high, locust-like Krahdas to the three-story tall Dark Vibrace, which looks like a cross between a Tyrannosaurus rex and a rhinoceros beetle.
Pokémon: The franchise has a large number of Mons that are based off of insects or arachnids, and all of them are huge compared to those found in real life.
- This is quite typical of the in-game Bug-type. The absolute smallest member of this group is Joltik, a 4-inch-long tick. More common Bug mons like Caterpie tend to be around the size of small dog. The largest? Scolipede, an eight-foot tall, 442 lb., roaring centipede!
- Pokémon Sun and Moon have UB-02 Beauty Pheromosa and UB-02 Absorption Buzzwole; the former is a Statuesque Stunner of a roach woman while the later is a massive mosquito man with a body that puts Superman to shame. They are not to be trifled with.
- And none of those hold a candle to the over 200' long Gigantimax Centiskorch in Pokémon Sword and Shield, whose size and raw heat can destabilize air currents.
Resident Evil:
- The series liked to play this by having giant snakes, tarantulas, and a Black Tiger... a Giant Spider that Capcom specifically redesigned from Resident Evil (Remake) on so it looks like an Australian funnelweb to make Chris or Jill shit themselves.
- Drain Deimos and Brain Suckers (giant fleas) in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis and Reapers (giant bipedal roaches) in Resident Evil 5.
- In Resident Evil 6, according to the designers, all of the "combat mutations" for the J'avo are based on this; mantis-like sickle-claws, legs being replaced by spider-legs or the body of a giant moth, armor-plating based on clumps of sea lice, Combat Tentacles based on the body of a silkworm, replacing the head with a monstrous stag beetle or a cluster of three cicadas or the abdomens of two bees... Ironically, most of the "Complete Mutations" that pop out of chryssalids aren't insect-based, except for the one that turns the J'avo into a sentient swarm of giant bees.
In addition to multiple varieties of giant spiders which are about knee height to a player character, RuneScape also has Kalrag, which is a spider much bigger than the human player character (and surrounded by the smaller giant spiders; that portion of the relevant quest is not good for arachnophobics), as well as several forms of giant cockroach, and some giant beetles called kalphite, which range from workers the size of the aforementioned giant spiders, to the building sized Kalphite Queen.
The Kitins of Ryzom are giant insects and shellfish that are largely responsible for the two Great Swarmings that have occurred in the game—one in its backstory, one in the game proper. They include the docile (and rather Ugly Cute) Kipee and Kiban, the Giant Flyer Kizoar and Kipesta, the downright terrifying (and huge) Kirosta, Kincher, Kinrey, and Kipucka, and the extremely rare (and extremely ugly) Kizarak.
Sea Salt: Many of the beginner units are giant arthropods, mollusks, and annelids — specifically the Swarm (small arthropods resembling tiny Zerglings), the Worm (giant worms that spew acid), and Crabs.
The PC version of A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) has giant mosquitoes as occasional enemies. Klaus comments that he's seen pictures of large mosquitoes in his books, but has never seen them that big. Strangely, no one seems to pay much attention to their size.
Shade: Wrath of Angels have enemies which are either The Undead, or giant insects, including giant spiders, scorpions, and scarabs. The largest of these can and will chomp your head off with ease.
Shadow Guardian have giant scarab beetles as enemies in the Luxor Temple, with a tank-sized scarab as a boss.
The Shadow Hearts series isn't a stranger to this trope. In fact, the giant roach monster (Buggs in the first game, Gregor in both Covenant and From the New World) hold the honor of being the only enemy to appear in every game of the trilogy. Other Big Creepy Crawlies include Zosim (a wasp pupa infected by a parasitic snake), a flesh-eating centipede, large snails that feed on human blood, Megafilaria and Gigafilaria (magic-powered leech-like creatures) and Gatorback/Scorplinus (heavily-armoured scorpions).
The first two Sinjid games contained giant bugs as low to mid-level enemies. Battle Arena had the weakly Purple Critter and its stronger variants, the Metal-Tailed Moth and the Spirit Bug, while Shadow of the Warrior had the Poison Wasp, the first enemy to be found inside the Monster Portal.
Several of the enemies in Solatorobo, including one called the "bigant". Elh thinks they are horrifying and demands that Red kill them immediately; Red, for his part, says they are "harmless" (despite the fact that they try to kill you like any other enemy), but usually goes about killing them anyway.
Spiritfarer:
- Nebula pillbugs, the adults of which are about the size of a sheep. Thankfully, they're friendly.
- Jacob, Stanley's pet ghost beetle, is almost as big as the mushroom child spirit himself. The ghost mites, which Stella can help Stanley and Jacob collect for their ectoplasm, are much smaller, but they're still relatively bigger than real-life mites.
The draclets in Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage! are bugs that are big enough to eat a snow leopard. Thankfully, they won't harm Spyro.

Skrashers in Startopia: They develop aboard your station inside the trash-eating Memaus before bursting out as huge insectile monsters with giant claws to smash up your station. They can also turn up through a random event as a Shout-Out to Alien.
Supa Robo Gakuen features giant cockroaches in one sidequest - large enough to act as summoners, not monsters, in a Mons game!
Super Mario Bros.: Some of the enemies in the series games appear to be giant insects.
- Mario Bros.: Fighter Fly is a large insect enemy that starts roaming the playable area from Stage 6 onwards. It moves by making short leaps, meaning that Mario and Luigi have to time when to hit their standing floor from below in order to stun it. It returns in Super Mario Bros. Special and Super Mario Land, while a Mystery Mushroom costume based on it can be unlocked in Super Mario Maker.
- Super Mario Bros. introduces the Buzzy Beetles, which resemble reptilian beetles that act like Koopas, but cannot be killed with fireballs. These enemies only appear in a few worlds during a normal playthrough, but replace the Goombas in all worlds during the New Game Plus.
- Super Mario Bros. 2: Hoopsters are giant labybugs that constantly clamber up and down trees and vines. They're especially prevalent in 5-2 and 6-3, where they impede the quartets' attempts to climb up vines. They're generally harmless when they are below the player, but cause damage when they climb down from above. They move quicker when Mario and friends are nearby, who have to jump to another vine to avoid the Hoopster.
- Super Mario World introduces the Wigglers, which are giant yellow caterpillars that will become angry (and turn red) if stomped on. Fireballs don't kill them either. Defeating them requires either throwing a strong object at them, or using an Invincibility Power-Up.
- Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins has an ant species known as Antotto. These are large-sized ants that can be found in Tree Zone and Macro Zone; those of the former simply walk around, but in the latter world special variants can be found: Some have spikes on their bodies, some dig with shovels to throw dirt balls at Mario, and some shoot pellets with a cannon in their heads. A successor species called Ant Trooper appears later in Super Mario 3D World and Super Mario Maker 2.
- Super Mario Galaxy has the Mandibugs and Flipbugs. The former are giant beetles that charge at either Mario/Luigi and can only be killed with a Ground Pound, due to them having a large star on their backs. The latter are cowardly insects that will run away if they see Mario/Luigi in normal form (and falling over if they get too close), but will chase them is they see them in bee form.
- Super Mario 3D Land: The game marks the debut of Biddybuds and Stingbies. Biddybuds are ladybug-like mooks that walk in a specific pattern; a flying version known as Para-biddybud is also present. The Stingby is a Bee Afraid version that flies towards Mario when he's in its vicinity; it returns in Super Mario 3D World and Super Mario Maker 2.
- Super Mario Odyssey: The Urban Stingby is a mosquito relative of the Stingby, and comes in two forms: Larval and adult. They attack by charging at Mario and exploding when hitting him or a solid wall.
Super Mario Fusion Revival has a level (3-1: Viscuous Burrow) full of maggots about as big as Mario. Then you get farther into the level and have to avoid bigger ones...
Tales of Symphonia: Approximately human-sized ladybugs are a type of enemy.
Many of the monsters in Epyx's Temple of Apshai fall under this trope, including giant centipedes, giant leeches, giant ticks, giant wasps, giant fire bugs, and giant mosquitos. Possibly justified as Apshai is described as a giant Insect God.
Temtem has a few mons based on arthropods. For example, Scaravolt and Shaolant are a rhinocerous beetle and anthropomorphic ant, respectively, and they're both 1.5m tall, which is taller than most children. Arachnyte, a robotic spider, is 20cm (2/3 of a foot) taller than them.
Terraria has many examples, from antlions (including the rarely seen flying life stage) to underground worms to giant bees and hornets, and terrifyingly large spiders. If you're lucky, you can even get the Honeyed Goggles from the Queen Bee boss, allowing the player to summon and ride a slightly smaller giant bee.
Tiny Hands Adventure: Giant wasps are an enemy Borti faces in the game.
Titan Quest: Several giant insects, usually in Egypt. Including spiders, scarabs, antlions, and mantises. They're accordingly classified as Insects, which also includes half-human examples such as Arachni and Scorpos.
The Twins has a giant beetle that acts as the pet of the villains.
In Vectorman 2, Earth is taken over by giant insects mutated by the toxic waste that polluted their environments (and which Orbots like Vectorman were tasked with disposing of by taking to the Sun). These giant insects serve as the game's enemies, and a few of them serve as its bosses. Their leader is the Spider Queen, a giant black widow spider with an exposed brain in her thorax who serves as the game's Final Boss.
One of the fighters in War of the Monsters is Preytor, a mutated preying mantis that more or less is The Deadly Mantis. One of her alternate costumes is instead a winged ant.
The Way of Cinnamon: One of the enemy types Cinnamon can face is giant beetles.
World of Warcraft has a number of notable examples, in addition to various giant spiders, scorpions and the like.
- The Silithid are a hive-dwelling race with a great deal of internal variation (or possibly several sub-species) to fulfill different roles. The Old God C'Thun transformed some of them into the Aqir. The Aqir empire launched a Bug War to wipe out all non-Aqiraji life, and on their defeat split into two different races, the Qiraji and the Nerubians. The first remained servants of C'Thun, and continued to launch Bug Wars against the rest of Azeroth. The Nerubians left for Northrend where they created an underground empire, which was destroyed by the Scourge. Although some materials describe them as being just as xenophobic and evil as the Qiraji, the entirety of player interaction with living Nerubians is friendly. They also abandoned the worship of C'Thun on the basis that it "makes as much sense as a fly caught in a web worshiping the spider who is about to devour him".
- Mists of Pandaria introduced the mantid, a sister race to the Aqir, who served another Old God, Y'Shaarj; they also have a particular breed of insect called the kunchong, house-sized bugs with scythe-like arms. One kunchong uses its bulk to bash down one of the gates in the Serpent's Spine, the game's equivalent to the Great Wall of China, while an even bigger one smashes a huge hole in the wall itself.
Xenoblade Chronicles X: All of the insectoid indigens are big. The smallest types, Blattas, are on average the size of a dog, and they just get bigger from there, up to the whale-sized Millepods and the legendarily massive Sabula Tyrants.

Web Animation

Humans-B-Gone!: The setting is inhabited by macrovolutes, sapient insects and arachnids — other types of arthropods explicitly do not reach these sizes — so huge that humans are to them what normal bugs are to us.

Webcomics

A Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe:
- Some of the early void beasts that the Everyman fights are a giant void fly and a large void cockroach, each about the same size as he is. They are fairly weak foes, on the whole — the fly on briefly threatens him due to his inexperience and lack of good gear, while the cockroach is swiftly beheaded before being able to inflict any damage.
- Later, the Everyman is attacked by a humongous void wasp several times larger than the tank he's hiding in at the time, which proves a much more dangerous opponent.
Blue Moon Blossom: At one point, the bunny and dino have to travel through a Lethal Lava Land, with volcanoes crawling with enormous shadowy caterpillars that are nearly as long as the mountains are tall.
Crossed Claws: The "Tall Things" turn out to be insectile monsters that can mimic mammalian species and possess some sort of control over plants.
Daddy-Long-Legs: The cast is made up of anthropomorphic arthropods, the smallest of which are about human-sized.
El Goonish Shive: Grace encounters a giant roach.
Free Spirit (2014): "Bedbugs and Broomsticks" has Winnie and her friends confront some giant bedbugs, who grew after sucking Winnie's magical blood.
Girl Genius:
- The warrior-type slaver wasps are aggressive insect-like creatures the size of a large hound.
- The Hoomhoffers, one of the products of mad science the Baron has included in his army, are giant beetles around the size of tanks.
Gunnerkrigg Court: Zimmy is briefly menaced by a large, insectile thing that may or may not actually exist.
I Log In Alone: The first dungeons after the test dungeon Jung entered are full of nothing but giant centipedes.

Manly Guys Doing Manly Things: Commander Badass is very uncomfortable around millipedes ever since his tour on the millipede planet during millipede season. He spent most of it covered in huge millipedes. The kicker was an encounter with a giant millipede that promptly vomited even more millipedes on his head. So his daughter got herself a pet millipede.
Mr Square: In this comic, a balloon reveals a horde of normal-sized spiders when popped... whose presence promptly summons a spider the size of a cottage to join them.
The Order of the Stick: In the bonus story Uncivil Servant, Belkar is repeatedly ambushed by an ankheg, a type of burrowing acid-dripping bug from Dungeons & Dragons.
Outsider: The Umiak are a species of six-limbed aliens that are very mantis-like in appearance, with exoskeletons, multiple segmented eyes, and rigid mandibles, but are roughly the size of a human or larger.
The Petri Dish: Through genetic engineering, Thaddeus Euphemism has created a giant fly and several giant (talking) bees.

Web Original

The City of Never: Some of the creatures from the City are contorted arachnid or slug-like beings. The most notable example is the Needler, a spider-like abomination that can create more slug and leech-like monsters.
Dreamscape: In the flashback in "A Curse or a Blessing", Melinda's curse's first form is a giant purple spider that goes down with a single Shock Bomb.
- The insect creature that attacks Vampire Lord, Anjren, and Ahjeen in that episode is the size of a human.
DSBT InsaniT: Bee is a bee about the size of a dog. He is a friendly pet store owner though.
The Motley Two has a giant beetlebeast with about dog-like intelligence, and a giant belligerent "mantid". Both of these are the lusii of the troll protagonists (in case you haven't read Homestuck, their pets/guardians/surrogate parents) and are scheduled to train to become BRAVE AND MIGHTY STEEDS once their owners are drafted into the army.
An image offering worthless "advice" on surviving wild animal attacks depicts a wasp in between a goose and a snake ("turn it into a balloon") and claims that this wasp is apparently the size of a goose so you're screwed.
SCP Foundation:
- SCP-363 ("Not Centipedes"). Under normal circumstances they look like the real life Amazonian giant centipede, which can grow up to a foot in length. However, if it's darker than dusk^notedarker than 2 lux, to be exact they rapidly grow in size, and can easily grow to at least 30 feet in length and 6 feet in width. And not only that, as it grows it get new body parts, like tentacles and eyes.
- SCP-1575 ("Venus Statue"). When the water altered by SCP-1575 is drunk by a mammal, parasitic vermin infesting the mammal can start changing into human beings. They usually don't survive, but you can end up with half human/half flea or half human/half tapeworm abominations.
Reemus, of The Several Journeys of Reemus, tends to deal with these guys, which makes the fact that he's not quite as famous or well-respected as his dragonslayer brother just a bit nonsensical, since Reemus can and sometimes does take out entire colonies of giant beasties in his line of work, while his brother usually only gets one at a time.
The beetles in Spoilsbury Toast Boy range from normal beetle size to human size, with one about as big as a house.
Half the characters of Starship are Big Creepy Crawlies, who implant their eggs in mammals and gladly give their lives for the hive and their Overqueen... and they're (mostly) good guys. The protagonist is a bug named Bug who talks and acts like he just walked out of a Disney movie, and eventually the audiences gets to see a small Bug War where both sides' POV is clearly shown: "OMG, these things are disgusting and gross! We've gotta destroy 'em before they destroy us!"
One episode of The Storage Papers featured giant, cave-dwelling mantises that live in the wilderness of Palomar Mountain. Oh, and they can think.
Tech Infantry features the Arachnids, also known simply as The Bugs. Yes, they're shamelessly ripped off from Starship Troopers. But these versions are, if anything, even scarier. The Guardian Bugs, Emperor Bugs, and Queen Bugs are enormous, easily fifty feet tall. And those and the smaller but still deadly Warrior Bugs can use magic.
The Large Beetle from Water-Human, at least in episode one (later on, he gets smaller, which is explained by a Hand Wave). He's actually friendly and intelligent, and is the protagonist's closest friend.
Howdy from Welcome Home (Clown Illustrations) is a giant anthropomorphic caterpillar who towers over the other characters in artwork. Subverted since he's the good-natured local shopkeeper.
In We're Animals in a Post-Apocalyptic Town, the first monster faced by the heroes, in the forest ruins, is a giant stag beetle.
You Have Become Your Avatar: One of things found in the Springfield between the border of New Mexico and Colorado is a gigantic termites' nest. The termites tried to attack Joshua and bRaHiAn because they were intruders, but they were easily beaten back. One of their biggest weaknesses is hot water.

Western Animation

Amphibia has plenty of these ranging from cat-sized to being large enough to eat one of the Frog Men who inhabit Amphibia. Said frog-people also keep some of them as pets or farm animals, with the Plantar family owning a giant snail named Bessie that they use as a pack animal.
Bonkers had a recurring villain named Al Vermin, who happened to be a cartoon roach. His henchmen were also giant anthropomorphic insects.
Codename: Kids Next Door: "Operation: L.I.C.E. had the Sector V operatives dealing with a swarm of giant mutated hair-eating lice that infested their treehouse, thanks to the Delightful Children from Down the Lane after Numbuh 5 infiltrated their mansion to steal tortilla chips for their nacho cheese dinner, to which they swapped out her real hat with one infested with the lice. After the operatives defeat the swarm with nacho cheese, they give the Delightful Children A Taste of Their Own Medicine by stealing Lenny's football helmet and swapping it out with one with lice.
Courage the Cowardly Dog: "Courage in the Big Stinkin' City" features Bushwick, a big, humanoid, talking cockroach. (And while he is scary, he is not the scariest thing in this episode, which is saying a lot, as it is one of the creepiest episodes in an already-creepy series.)
Dex Hamilton: Alien Entomologist: Most of the alien insects Dex and his crew deal with are of the giant variety.
Fangbone!: Skullbanian slugs and snails are huge, carnivorous, lightning-fast monsters that spit acid and inhabit slime-drenched hives. Big Bad Venomous Drool occasionally sends them out to fight Fangbone and Bill, and was in fact actually raised as an infant by said slugs.
Freaktown: Lenny is a ditzy man-sized praying mantis who happens to be the best friend and roommate of protagonist Ben.
Godzilla: The Series:
- "Where is Thy Sting?": Ts-eh-Go is a massive Kaiju-sized scorpion that turned out to be the First Wave of a secret military project. There's also a swarm of smaller scorpions around the size of a human torso which were created as the Second Wave of the same project after the First Wave proved uncontrollable. Both are disposed of by Godzilla and the episode ends with the revelation that a Third Wave of monster scorpions are currently under development.
- Zilla Jr. fights a number of other super-sized bugs throughout the series, including giant bees, spiders, cicadas, and mosquitoes.
Jonny Quest vs. the Cyber Insects: The titular mutant space-bugs, which Big Bad Dr. Zin created from ordinary Earth insects (cockroaches, ants, etc.).
In the Kim Possible episode "Roachie," a scientist unleahes an army of giant roaches on Middleton. Ron, who is terrified of regular-sized cockroaches, is strangely not grossed out by the giant sized bugs and befriends one.
Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: The mutant-dominated future world is home to a variety of oversized arthropods, most notably the giant, three-tailed, blind scorpions known as deathstalkers.
Martin Mystery: "Terror from the Sky" has the protagonists deal with giant bugs mutated by a radioactive meteorite.
Men in Black: The Series: A common foe, as one of the recurring villain races are precisely the Bugs; a race of sapient Always Chaotic Evil Insectoid Aliens.
My Life as a Teenage Robot: The main villains are the Cluster, robots who look like beetles, roaches, and bees.
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Changelings naturally resemble insectoid equines the size of ponies, but Pharynx specifically shows a preference for adopting a massive form resembling a cross between a spider, a fly and a tank when he needs to fight or intimidate someone else.
The New Adventures of Superman: In "The Lethal Lightning Bug", the eponymous creature is a gigantic lightning bug created when lightning strike a swamp.
The Powerpuff Girls (1998): "Bubblevision" featured a giant ant eating the city like no tomorrow as the villain of the episode. In spite of the constant ridicule from her sisters when she needed glasses due to her vision going bad, Bubbles' new glasses end up being the girls' only hope at defeating it.
The Real Ghostbusters: "20,000 Leagues Under the Street", the last episode, had the team fighting giant insects made like that by an ancient Egyptian insect-like god named Apshai trying to Take Over the World.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars: In "Bounty", the milodons used as mounts by the Kages resemble centipedes the length of city buses.
Superfriends: One episode has the superheroes facing giant insects controlled by an intelligent giant Scorpion.
3-2-1 Penguins!: In "Lazy Daze", the Rockhopper crew encounters giant ants while out on a picnic.
Transformers:
- Kickback, Bombshell, and Shrapnel are all Decepticons that can turn into insects.
- Beast Wars had Inferno show up in the second season for the Predacons. Beast form, giant ant. Robot form, giant ant-headed robot whose abdomen turned into a flamethrower. Best known for thinking he was actually an ant, referring to their ship (and at first, just his pod) as "the colony," and referring to Megatron as "my queen". A majority of the Predacons also took on insect or arthropod modes.
- Transformers: Prime: The Insecticons are back, and they're bigger and uglier than ever.

Real Life

Giant insects/arthropods were common from the Ordovician to the Carboniferous period, with foot-long cockroaches, seagull-sized dragonflies, 8 and a half-foot long millipedes and 3-foot long scorpions. Foot-long versions of these survived into the Permian period. This was only possible because the oxygen in the atmosphere was almost ridiculously high at the time, 2-3 times today's. Since arthropods absorb oxygen through small holes in their body, their size is strictly limited by the concentration of oxygen in the air.
For decades, the entomology department of the University of Illinois have held an annual Insect Fear Film Festival, at which movies with Big Creepy Crawlies are screened. After each film, members of the department bring out live examples of the corresponding arthropods — large tarantulas, centipedes, and stag beetles are favorites — and pass them among the audience while they explain the biological implausibilities of giant insects.
The infamous Giant Asian Hornet is the size of your thumb, can fly faster than you can run, and its sting has venom that dissolves flesh and has pheromones that call more of the damn things to attack you, and they live in and around major cities like Tokyo?
- They also massacre honeybees. 30 giant hornets can kill 30000 honeybees in under an hour!
- On the other hand, their larvae are delicious when fried. They taste like crab-flavored popcorn!
- Also Japanese Honeybees can outwit the hornets by luring them into the hive, swarm them and shake and bake. Most bees survive, the hornets are toast. However, the presence of the hornets has made it difficult to import more productive European honeybees to East Asia.
- These "Murder Hornets" arrived in North America in 2019 and became front-page news in 2020.
- Other insects are also capable of defeating Asian Giant Hornets. A full-grown Praying Mantis is more than capable of eating these hornets.
- Even bigger than the giant Asian hornet is the giant scarab-hunting wasp of Sumatra and Java. It's three inches long, and has a wingspan of more than four inches. Fortunately for the wasp-phobic among us, it's solitary and doesn't live in colonies. It preys on the larvae of the Atlas beetle, which also qualifies for this trope by being one of the world's largest beetles.
Cicada killer wasps (Sphecius species) are as big as Asian giant hornets and sometimes get mistaken for them. They're less dangerous, though (unless you are a cicada), and can be differentiated at a distance because they have small black heads rather than huge orange ones.
The wingspan record among the butterflies is held by the White Witch moth, just under 300mm. On the second place is Atlas Moth spanning up to 262 mm. Other than looking somewhat weird due to reinforced wing edges it's a fairly typical butterfly, so it has no mouth and can't bite you, so if one lands on your hand◊, all it can really do is to sit there or take off again.
Normal wetas, insects that look similar to katydids, crickets or grasshoppers native to New Zealand, are large enough at 4cm, but the giant weta can grow to a whooping 10cm in size, not including the legs and the antennae, and can weigh up to 35g. Largest reported cases have reached double those numbers and became the most massive insect known. This thing weighs as much as 3 mice and can eat a small carrot all on her own.
Scolopendra gigantea, the Amazon giant centipede. Centipedes are creepy enough, but Scolopendra gigantea is about a foot long. It occasionally can eat a toad or even a small bat. There's people who keep this as a pet or simply collect a few and let them hang around and feed on pests. If you're in the American Southwest, you may actually see a close and slightly smaller relative, Scolopendra heros. That's "slightly" smaller, not "small."
Goliath beetles are the world's heaviest beetles, measuring between 2.4 to 4.3 inches long and weighing as much as an apple. They also have some of the heaviest grubs of any insect species, which can weigh in at a whopping 3 and a half ounces and measuring up to 10 inches long.
- The titan beetle (Titanus giganteus) of South America can reach nearly 7 inches in length; for comparison, goliath beetles are usually about 4 inches. Other rivals for the title of largest beetle include the various rhinoceros beetles, most prominently the elephant and hercules beetles of South America and the atlas beetle of Southeast Asia.
The biggest arthropods of all time, the eurypterids (aka "sea scorpions") were marine cousins to modern arachnids, and they lived worldwide from the Ordovician to Permian. Even average-sized eurypterid species could grow 8 inches long, and the biggest exceeded 8 feet.
Australia's infamous huntsman spiders, which boast leg spans of up to one foot. Luckily, the species humans most frequently run into, Delena cancerides, are not aggressive towards humans, although meeting one can be slightly surprising. They tend to happily eat roaches, flies, mosquitoes, and other pests in a house.
Megachile pluto, or Wallace's Giant Bee, is 1.5 inches long with huge mandibles which are used to build nests inside termite mounds.
Stick insects wouldn't win any weight records, but they are among the longest insects, with some approaching or over a foot long. There's also the related giant leaf insect, which is typically between 4 and 6 inches long and around 3 or 4 wide; it looks like a leaf until you see it moving.
While not the size of the Paleozoic behemoths mentioned above, the Triassic Titanopterans are massive insects by anyone's standards. These carnivorous mantis-like insects could have wingspans as long as 14 inches and were probably carnivorous.
Trilobites were no slouches. One genus is known to have exceeded two feet, longer than the biggest confirmed finds of their Spiritual Successor, the giant isopod, which itself can achieve lengths of up to 20 inches.

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Big Creepy-Crawlies

Examples:

Video Example(s):

The Bugs

Alternative Title(s): Big Creepy Crawly, Giant Bug, Giant Insect, Giant Arthropod

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Big Creepy-Crawlies

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Examples:

Video Example(s):

The Bugs

Alternative Title(s): Big Creepy Crawly, Giant Bug, Giant Insect, Giant Arthropod

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The Bugs