"Dispatch, we have a problem."
Most like a spider she was, but huger than the great hunting beasts, and more terrible than they because of the evil purpose in her remorseless eyes. Great horns she had, and behind her short stalk-like neck was her huge swollen body, a vast bloated bag, swaying and sagging beneath her legs; its great bulk was black, blotched with livid marks, but the belly underneath was pale and luminous and gave forth a stench. Her legs were bent, with great knobbed joints high above her back, and hairs that stuck out like steel spines, and at each leg's end there was a claw.
— The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Arachnophobia is probably the second-most popular phobia (after coulrophobia), and even non-arachnophobes have to admit that spiders can be pretty freaky. Therefore, the most popular form of Big Creepy-Crawlies and one of the most popular 50-Foot Whatevers to attack has to be (don't click the link if you like to browse TV Tropes before bed) a big spider
. The bigger they are, the less likely there are to be more of them, but they're almost all so big that they realistically shouldn't be able to move or breathe (according to natural laws of our universe's Earth, given our atmosphere's oxygen concentration). They will usually have hypertoxic venom, both spin webs and hunt for prey, and spit Projectile Webbing out of their mouths (most spiders in real life only focus on one trait). For extra terror, they may even attack in groups (again, most spiders in real life are solitary).
Needless to say, they can be a bit of a problem for viewers that really are arachnophobic, especially in video games with them as a featured enemy. Many games get around this by making the spiders relatively cartoonish, or not having them correspond to any real-life spiders. Granted, they can still be freaky due to the sheer nature of being giant spiders.
They usually have little personality, beyond vague malevolence. Some of them can talk, but they're rarely very chatty, and only very rarely will they overlap with Friendly Neighborhood Spider. They can turn up in a variety of situations, but their most common habitats are the Hungry Jungle and vast caverns Beneath the Earth. In fantasy works, they are also likely to turn up in dark, trackless and haunted forests, especially if the work is closely patterned after Tolkien. Sometimes, they're just ordinary spiders who meet up with a protagonist who is small, although it amounts to the same thing.
Not to be confused with Demonic Spiders, who are just difficult enemies, or Money Spiders, which are just enemies that drop money even though they logically shouldn't — although either of these can be literal spiders.
Compare Giant Enemy Crab. Subtrope of Dire Beast. Crossed over with Humongous Mecha, you get the Spider Tank.
Examples with their own pages:
Other Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Digimon: Two Digimon skirt the line, namely Dokugumon (technically an insect that spins webs) and Arachnemon/Arukenimon (who is more like a drider than the more spider-like Dokugumon).
- The Fruit of Evolution: In the anime version, Seichii first starts warming up to his Abhorrent Admirer, the Killer Gorilla Salia, when she rescues him from a giant spider that attacks him when he tries to sneak away from her.
- Inuyasha: Giant spiders or spider-like beings are common, weak Youkai in feudal Japan. Sango and her family were tricked by Naraku (who's a spider-based demon himself) into fighting a giant, ogre-faced spider. In the final battle, Naraku's outer shell is a gargantuan black spider who acts as a final dungeon.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind uses the "shrunken hero" vs. regular-sized spider variant, as Formaggio traps Narancia (who has been affected by Formaggio's Little Feet stand) in a bottle and pits him against a normal tarantula.
- Majin Devil: The third chapter is rife with them. Demonic dog-sized spiders with embryos on their backs that crawl out of pregnant girls' hoohahs, tear their way out of their stomachs or rip themselves out of hosts' heads.
- Naruto: In his fight with Kidomaru, Neji fights giant spiders.
- Negima! Magister Negi Magi: One of these accompanied Kotarou on his first battle against Negi in the Kyoto Arc. It was banished by Asuna with one swing of her Iron Fan.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion: Matarael, which looks like a bowl with lots of eyes and has four legs.
- One Piece:
- The general zombie Talleran is an enormous spider that was crossed with a monkey by Dr. Hogback. If that wasn't enough he commands a large group of smaller (yet still big comparatively) spiders that were crossed with mice. Vice-Admiral Onigumo also lives up to his name by turning into some sort of human/spider hybrid with 8 arms, all with swords, and 2 legs to stand on.
- One of the Elite Mooks from the Punk Hazard arc, "Machete" Run is a spider-centaur with a massive arachnid body, implying that giant spiders exist in the world of One Piece.
- 3×3 Eyes: Two different Demon Beasts resembling giant spiders appear under the control of Yakumo and Benares: the former has Jing Gu (Mirror Bug), a spider-like being the size of a soccer ball who can reflect light attacks and spin thread. Benares control the much more formidable Fu Yao Zhizhu (Monster-Binding Spider), a giant, more realistic-looking spider that pins its victims down, extract their energy, and then imprisons them into a cocoon. Benares states that this monster can subdue even an immortal Wu like Yakumo.
- So I'm a Spider, So What?: The main character is this, as well as her "family" after she's reincarnated. Her "mother" exaggerates in sheer size, and is unsurprisingly one of the strongest non-deity entities in the series given the power she has compared to even the settings dragons, as well as the sheer destruction she can cause.
- Spider Riders, as its name suggests, features giant spiders as the characters' mounts.
- Spirited Away: Kamaji the boiler man is a youkai who seems to be a cross between an old man and a large spider. (Or perhaps an opilione, also known as harvestmen or daddy longlegs.) He's not quite as scary as the other examples on this page, and is actually a rather decent fellow.
- TSUKIMICHI -Moonlit Fantasy-: Mio, one of the story's two female protagonists, is a giant magic-absorbing super-powered spider-monster called The Black Spider of Calamity.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds: Uru is a very big and menacing spider-looking Eldritch Abomination.
- The☆Ultraman has a monster called Darantulas, a giant tarantula with giant moth wings. It used to be an ordinary creature from an alien planet, until an experiment on it Goes Horribly Wrong.
Asian Animation
- Lamput: In "Shape Shift", one of Lamput's transformations is a giant spider. The docs morph into a fly swatter afterwards to squash him.
- Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf:
- Wolffy runs into one in episode 65 and gets Projectile Webbing powers from it.
- In one episode of Mighty Little Defenders, Gogoa is shown in a flashback being chased and bitten by a giant hallucination spider. It's actually being powered by a chip and shrinks to normal size once the chip is removed.
Card Games
- Arkham Horror: The Card Game: The stronger minions of the spider-god Atlach-Nacha range from Leng spiders (dog-sized) to really huge ones.
- Clank! A Deck-Building Adventure has a giant spider as the antagonist of the Gold and Silk expansion. It is the progenitor of the webs that ensnare treasures on one side of the board, and the guardian of abandoned Dwarven mines in the other. In any case, they serve as an undefeatable presence that stalk the players throughout their journey.
- Magic: The Gathering has several spiders as creature cards, and they're usually able to block creatures with flying, representing flying creatures (from small birds and insects to full-sized griffins and small dragons) getting caught in their webs.
- The first was actually called "Giant Spider", and holds the distinction of having been the only card to have been in every base set printed until it was left out of Magic 2013, although it came back in Magic 2014 and still holds the record for longest continuous run in the core sets.
- A trend in card art depicts spiders in the act of subduing very large flying monsters. Skynsare Spider is shown preying on a griffon; Goliath Spider is shown eating a drake.
- Plated Spider has the amusing flavor text "Most spiders wait patiently for their prey to arrive. Most spiders aren't forty feet tall."
- Planechase gave us Dragonlair Spider, which spawns insects. Spiders aren't insects, but then you read the flavour text. Those insects are not spawns of the spider; they're scavengers eating the bits of dragons that the spider discards. That thing eats dragons.
- The planes of Shadowmoor and Innistrad — both based on horror themes, fairytale horror in the first case and Hammer Horror in the second — are both home to a specific species of giant spiders the size of cottages known as gloomwidows. They start out as ground-based hunters who kill their prey with their powerful venom, but become preferential web-spinners as they mature. Those from Shadowmoor cover whole cliffs with their webs, while those from Innistrad are often found in abandoned towns, with webs filling the air between spires and belltowers, although others lurk in graveyards instead.
- The first was actually called "Giant Spider
Comedy
- In Phill Jupitus: Quadrophobia, he claims to have encountered two "Category 3" spiders:
The first time, I was nine and it was in my mum's house. Actually, it was in the bathroom. Actually, come to think of it, it was in the bath. Now, when I say "in the bath", it was actually having a bath. Six legs up the tap end, reading the Daily Mirror. "Fucking hell, Bobby Moore's gone to Fulham, what's that about? You alright, son, you don't look well."[...][After a description of moving a cabinet out of the cellar more recently] ...And there, in the corner of the cellar, was a bigger Category 3 than the one I saw when I was nine. This one reading Joseph Heller's Catch-22. This spider, who was wearing a beret, looks up at me and goes "He died last year, you know. A tragic loss to the world of literature, don't you agree? I always thought he had another novel in him, what say you?"
Comic Books
- All Eight Eyes is set in a world where giant spiders exist and prey on humans, but only a single vagrant is shown doing anything about them because people at large rationalize away any evidence. A teenager witnesses him killing one and is incapable of forgetting, so he ends up joining him. It's pointed out in the first issue that, though physical limitations prevent them from nesting anywhere but underground, physically they shouldn't be capable of being that big.
- Avengers: The Initiative: Trauma (whose superpower is turning into people's worst fears) transforms into one during a training exercise in issue #1. This turns out to be a very bad idea; the arachnophobic Armory freaks out and accidentally kills one of her teammates.
- Batman '66: "Caught in the Widow's Web"/"Batman Fights the Penguins' Dread" features the Black Widow siccing a giant spider named Lulah on the Dynamic Duo during the final battle.
- Captain Klutz: Gorgonzola is a giant spider with distinctly Martinesque features — which turned out to be a costume worn by a criminal who was wanted for 'trick-or-treating' without a license.
- Cavewoman: Meriem runs afoul of a nest of giant spiders in Cavewoman: Deadly Venom.
- Conan the Barbarian: Conan encounters giant spiders all the goddamn time in Marvel's Savage Sword of Conan comics, but his most famous adventure involving a giant spider is probably his battle with Omm, a giant spider worshiped as a god in the city of Yezud. A later adventure has Conan fighting Omm's equally large offspring, Zath.
- The Dark Tower: While not a giant spider per se, the Crimson King in the comic adaptation often sports a couple of spider legs and armored shell whenever he shows up.
- The Frankenstein Monster: One of the many opponents that the Monster must fight is a giant spider whose zombifying bite is used to create an army of slaves.
- The Goon has Spider (Actually called Percival Goodbody), a man-sized spider wearing a bowler hat with a tendency to cheat at card games getting him into trouble with Goon or other characters.
- Havoc Inc: In one issue, an unusually large tarantula caught Chester and Deck off guard as they were sleeping on a jungle planet. As portrayed on the cover art.
- Judge Dredd:
- AGV (Arachnid Gene Virus) is a rare disease in Mega City One that turns a person into a man-sized spider. One story features a woman with AGV slowly succumbing to it, and its sequel story has her visiting her husband who didn't stay by her side as promised...
- There are giant spiders in the Cursed Earth that dig burrows in the ground, where they lie waiting before attacking unsuspecting prey. Dredd and a team of Judges ran into a couple of them during a patrol outside the new mutant settlements.
- Additionally, there's an even rarer shapeshifting breed of giant spiders which disguise themselves as humans to seduce hapless men before devouring them.
- Jungle Comics: The villain Org uses a drum to control giant spiders.
- Justice Society of America: The denizens of Mercury that Johnny Thunder is found by in All-Star Comics # 13 look like giant spiders with a pair of their legs switched out for tentacles.
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1992): The monster fought in the Tower of Hera is a giant tarantula as opposed to the Moldorm fought in the game. However, when the monster's ghost appears in Ganon's Tower, Link identifies it as Moldorm.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): The second issue of "The Return of Queen Chrysalis" features a few. They wear hats. One of them doesn't have one, so it takes Applejack's.
- Necromunda: The Redeemer features a mutant giant spider whose eye can give its bearer Psychic Powers.
- Paperinik New Adventures: The Last Haga is a giant space spider. She is enormous (and can grow even bigger), is stated to be able to devour whole planets given enough time, reproduces extremely quickly and asexually (her offspring also qualify for this trope), and she is totally undetectable by radar or any other type of sensor. A small gang of space pirates worship the Haga as a deity, referring to her as "Ironheart", "Mother" and "Devourer". Furthermore, their wording imply that the giant Haga we see in action (which later merges with their spaceship upon returning) is the larval form of the Haga, implying that it could transform further.
- Samurai Squirrel: Nato-san takes on several spiders bigger than him in their own lair to rescue the baby bird that their leader, known as Silverback, kidnapped to eat.
- The Sandman (1989): Discussed. Barbara wonders if her dreamworld has these creatures, and learns that while it does, they are on her side, and very timid.
- Sojourn: The insect-like Urnethi use giant spiders as mounts.
- Spider-Man: A few show up.
- Spidey once builds one realistic enough to scare a thug trapped in a web into giving him information.
- And there was a villain who was obsessed with killing Spider-Man and for some reason would only use giant spider robots called "Spider Slayers" for the job. One version of the Spider Slayer was a scorpion though, which makes a bit more sense, given that scorpions do commonly prey upon spiders. This was the original reasoning in giving Mac Gargan the power and abilities of a scorpion to serve as Spider-Man's Evil Counterpart.
- To say nothing of Spider-Man transforming into the Half-Human Hybrid Man-Spider on occasion.
- The storyline Spider-Island is literally crawling with them.
- In the first team-up between the Superior Spider-Man and the X-Men, they tackle a giant spider, which in addition to having mutant powers, also has human eyes. After being stunned by Spidey, the creature turns into a normal-sized blond human woman. It was revealed to have been created by Spider-Man's enemy, the Jackal, using technology stolen from X-Men villain, Mr. Sinister.
- The Thousand was a a swarm of spiders that inhabit a human body. The main spider was the size of a human head.
- The villain Queen wanted Spider-Man to be her mate and vowed he would love her whether he wanted to or not. After easily beating Spidey in their first fight she forced a kiss on him and over the next few issues, it was discovered her kiss was slowly mutating him into a giant spider mutant. He eventually turns into a giant spider and is completely under Queen's control, and she plans to use him as an egg sac to give birth to her offspring. It was a small miracle that Peter managed to survive the process. His giant spider form died unexpectedly and he got his original body back.
- Marvel's Voices: "Inspiration" is about a black widow spider exposed to gamma radiation, turning into a large, sentient, animal who becomes inspired to fight crime after seeing Spider-Man and Silk. The scientist studying her nicknamed her "Spider-Hulk".
- In Supergirl storyline The Girl with the X-Ray Mind appears a Reptilian Spider, a car-sized red arachnid which used to live in Krypton's Flame Forest. Its giant mandibles can easily uproot large trees.
- The Tintin story The Shooting Star (also present in the animated series) has a meteor with strange properties crash in the Atlantic ocean (without causing an extinction event), and it doesn't sink. After winning the Race Against the Clock to plant his team's flag first on said meteor, Tintin opens his cantine and a minuscule spider escapes from it. Fast-forward a minute or so later, the spider has grown giant due to the meteor's strange properties, and starts attacking Tintin, only to be crushed under a giant apple from a giant apple tree that grew from an apple Tintin had a bite in and threw away.
- The Transformers Megaseries: Arachnosaurs are massive spider-like ambush predators native to an alien planet that Wheelie gets trapped on. They're big enough to pose a serious threat to most Cybertronians (though they're no match for Monstructor).
- EC Comics: A story in The Vault of Horror has some white-collar criminals in a small plane get caught in a giant web spun between two mountains, deep in the South American jungle. When the denizen of the web shows up, they're dinner. The Vault-Keeper gleefully informs us that a smaller spider will probably curl up and die at the mere mention of the name "Giant Mountain Crawler."
- Wonder Woman Vol 1: In the Wonder Girl Impossible Tale in #116 Ronno tries to steal a necklace from the cave of a sea spider, and gets caught in its web as the truck-sized arachnid approaches to make a meal of him.
Fan Works
- Besides the Will of Evil: Ungoliants are enormous spider-like monsters created by Reiziger as muscle for his armies. They create an aura of shadow around themselves, and unlike real spiders, they have a poisonous stinger hidden beneath their bellies.
- Child of the Storm mentions the Acromantulae of the Forbidden Forest and Uhtred immediately perks up. Harry immediately tells him that no, he can't go hunt them because it would upset Hagrid. While this may seem odd, Uhtred is a teenage Asgardian well on course to be bigger than Thor and as strong as Volstagg and is, moreover, the protégé of Sif herself. In short, Harry is very right to worry for the spiders.
- Children of an Elder God: The first enemy Shinji fights is a skyscraper-sized spider-shaped Eldritch Abomination spread its webs all over the city and spawned millions of smaller spiders danced around its legs and flooded the city's streets.
It showed a creature that resembled a huge spider, hundreds of feet tall, lying on its side, its legs working the air feebly. It was surrounded by a charred cocoon of spider silk and the corpses of countless spiders. However, more were erupting up from the ground and forming from its blood, which was puddled around it. Furthermore, the charred marks on its exterior were fading, and ichor was no longer leaking from it.
- Divided Rainbow: Lero runs into a giant ("as tall as a rhinoceros, and equally as wide") seven-legged spider (the eighth leg is just an infected-looking stump) in chapter 3, and names it Mr. 7. He very nearly gets killed by it until Rarity shows up to help.
- Doctor Whooves – The Series: Along Came a Spider has pony-hoof-sized ones as well as ANASI, THE SPIDER GODDESS (straight from Metebelis III.
- Dungeon Keeper Ami:
- There are monsterous giant spiders, mainly used by Keeper Arachne, as seen in "Captured!":
With a strange wrenching noise, a quartet of giant spiders dropped out of thin air, each one landing in a separate corner of the room. Even the smallest of the ugly, hairy monsters was as big as a sheep at least, not even counting the long legs covered in sharp bristles.
- The Vermin Lord grants his Keepers the ability to enlarge vermin such as spiders to be bigger than buildings.
- There are monsterous giant spiders, mainly used by Keeper Arachne, as seen in "Captured!"
- Equestria Divided:
- Wood spiders, enormous creatures resembling spiders shaped out of living wood, are among the monsters native to the Everfree. They sometimes have poison-spitting plants rooted in their backs, allowing them to pelt enemies with poisonous liquids at range before moving in to maul them.
- One changeling unit, the weblings, resembles a monstrous spider with a changeling's head and can shoot tough Projectile Webbing.
- Heart of the Forest: After their abandonment, the White Tail Woods became home to colonies of spiders the size of deer.
- The Nightmare House: The spiders in Leni's nightmare are enlarged with "Super Spider Growy Stuff".
- Personality Conflicts: One appears in The Green-Eyed Monster, in the Castle of Nyghtmayr. The castle defenses replicate the same emotion-evoking powers as the eight Minor Demons, and Fyar's powers summon up a giant spider for Tasha to confront. She's able to defeat it by listing three biological reasons why the creature before her can't actually exist (any permeable-membraned egg that size would dry out before it could hatch; Square-Cube Law means "the cross-section of the legs only increase on a square curve" and would soon be too small to support it; and spiders and insects both "breathe through tracheal tubes that run from their 'skin' to their bloodstream. Those tubes can’t be longer than an inch or so, otherwise no air gets down them, and the spider suffocates"). Each example causes the spider to shrink until it's the size of a normal tarantula, allowing Tasha to step on it and crush it into nothing.
- Pony POV Series: There's the Polyphemus Gargantula, more commonly known as Giant Cyclops Spider. Aahg from G1 is a member of this species, however the first and most deadly of the entire species was Lahb, a creation of Hydia's ancestor, the First Witch Lilith. Lahb was a forty-foot tall titan with legs as wide as tree trunks and fangs big enough to impale a centaur.
- Prehistoric Park Reimagined: The newly discovered In-Universe Megalorachne prove to be reasonably massive spiders for the time period in which they naturally live in before their kind get rescued to be put on display at the titular park, with at least one of the females being explicitly confirmed to be at least the same size as one human character's head. Rather appropriately, they are explicitly based on the 'mesothelae' from Walking with Monsters.
- In Rise of the Minisukas, Matarael is a man-sized, multi-eyed spider-like abomination.
- The Secret Return of Alex Mack includes a crossover with Tarantula!, but unlike the original, after killing the 200-foot spider, a horde of car-sized babies appears; the SRI team has to invade their cave and deal with them. Alex gets nightmares afterwards for weeks.
- Various Vytal Ventures: "Bark and Bite" introduces a new form of Grimm, the Aggromantulas, which are big, fast, vicious, and carry a paralyzing venom in their fangs. Their Queen, however, is something else.
- The Vinyl and Octavia Series: One captures Vinyl and Octavia in its web in Vinyl and Octavia Machete Their Way Through the Jungle.
- Vow of Nudity: Haara and Walburt fight several (complete with flaming jaws) while infiltrating the Genasi volcano mines.
- Walking with Monsters: The Mesothelae are amongst the prehistoric animals rescued in Prehistoric Earth, and the first one seen is explicitly referred to as a "giant spider".
- The World of the Creatures: Batman and the Eleventh Doctor are captured by a colony of giant spiders that talk. It's implied that these are either from Harry Potter or The Hobbit.
- Witch Quest: Rochelle is a sane Witch whose normal form is of this. She even introduces herself this way to others at first ("Hwee ahr a giahnt spidahr"). She subverts the usual portrayal of this trope insofar as she's actually trying to help Magical Girls get happy endings, although mistrust, misunderstandings, and Napalm stand in the way (among others).
- The World is Filled with Monsters: The first monsters encountered in the story are a colony of enormous and very aggressive spiders, ranging from the size of a cat to the size of a house to the biggest of them all, Blightweaver, which is more than two stories tall and has legs as thick as tree trunks. The first sign the company gets of them is enormous webs stretching across most of a forest's canopy, with whole flocks of geese webbed up like flies.
Films — Animation
- Dreambuilders: Minna creates a giant mechanical one to scare Jenny during her nightmare. It later comes to life in the Dream Trash and attacks the two girls as they're trying to escape, until Minna shuts it down.
- Coraline: The Other Mother's true form is a sort of spider zombie doll thing with hands and legs made out of needles.
- Hellboy: Sword of Storms has a woman sitting in a forest clearing covered in fallen leaves playing a stringed instrument who looks perfectly normal...until her fingers start bleeding as she plays, spiders start to swarm around, Hellboy gets caught by three spiders the size of dogs, and the woman rises up out of the leaves to reveal an enormous spider abdomen and set of legs — then she starts to breathe fire.
- The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part: A real-life spider crawls over Emmet while he's stuck Undar of the Dryar. Of course it's tiny, but compared to a LEGO minifig it's huge, and freaks him out a bit.
- My Little Pony 'n Friends:
- Ahgg, the primary minion of the witches of the Volcano of Gloom, resembles a monstrous spider larger than a house, albeit one with a mammalian mouth and tusks and a single vertebrate eye.
- At the start of "The Ghost of Paradise Estate, Part 2", the ghost turns itself into (six-legged, vertebrate-faced) spider of giant size to scare the ponies.
- Oggy and the Cockroaches: The Movie: One tries to make a meal out of Oggy Magnon, only to get knocked out by the cat's smelly feet without him even noticing.
- The Secret of NIMH had a fairly large spider that looked enormous to the mouse protagonist. It mostly existed to serve as a very memorable way to establish the barely-controlled danger of the Great Owl; if Mrs. Brisby is threatened by a spider and the spider is nothing but a snack for the Owl... well, let's just say she's lucky to survive that scene.
- Superman fights a giant mechanical spider at the beginning of Superman: Doomsday, while Kevin Smith, in an animated cameo, looks on and says "Lame!". It's a Take That! against the Executive Meddling forced upon Smith's Superman Lives script — see below.
- Scroop, the main villain of Treasure Planet resembles an evil, giant alien spider/scorpion hybrid.
- Pinocchio in Outer Space. Among the creatures inhabiting the caves under the Martian city are spiders the size of a large building.
Gamebooks
- A really popular choice of enemy in the Fighting Fantasy series, starting from The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Notable examples include the "Mizugumo Fens" in Sword of the Samurai, where your hero can encounter and fight several giant spiders living in the marsh, Midnight Rogue (a gigantic spider shows up in the final dungeon as a rather difficult fight), and Howl of the Werewolf, where you can venture in a cavern infested by all manners of monstrous arachnids, including a literal spider-wolf horror and their queen, the vaguely humanoid Arachne.
- Subverted in Space Assassin, where aboard one of Cyrus' lab, you can uncover a giant spider who can talk, and communicate with you. Turns out this spider used to be a sentient life-form from another planet, one of the many victims abducted by Cyrus, an Evilutionary Biologist, and if you release him the spider will give you an important clue before leaving.
- In the GrailQuest series, the hero's Talking Sword Excalibur Junior is arachnophobic. This is problematic when fighting giant spiders, as the sword is either shaking in fear or plain refusing to be pulled from its scabbard.
- In the French gamebook series La Saga du Prêtre Jean, Giant Spiders are often encountered by the titular hero at least once per book, and sometimes will have fatal venom. The sole exceptions are Book 5, set in ancient India, and the last fanmade book set in Tibet.
Live-Action TV
- Arachnicide: The main antagonists are a horde of giant, super-aggressive spiders made by genetic engineering to destroy a commando unit for a drug cartel.
- The Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Selfless" starts out with one of these.
- The Monster of the Week in the Charmed (1998) episode "Spin City".
- Doctor Who:
- "Planet of the Spiders" has the titular Giant Spiders of Metebelis 3 (which evolved from normal spiders).
- "The Runaway Bride": The Racnoss, as a species, cross this trope with Horde of Alien Locusts, although the Empress is partially humanoid in appearance.
- "Kill the Moon": The Doctor and co. stumble upon giant germs shaped like spiders living on the Moon.
- "Arachnids in the UK": There's a mother spider the size of, in Graham's words, a van. It's actually a test subject from a university laboratory that grew that size after it was improperly disposed of by a waste company owned by a Corrupt Corporate Executive, which grew so large due to eating garbage in the landfill it was dumped in. And, unlike some other giant spiders on this show, it is affected by the Square-Cube Law, as when the Doctor finally confronts it, she realizes it's dying of suffocation as it's grown too big to breathe.
- In the Gilligan's Island episode "The Pigeon", the castaways run into a Black Morning Spider. It's six feet long, has red eyes, and weighs 500 lbs.
- Some seasons of Kamen Rider feature a spider monster in the first episode, and more recent seasons like Kamen Rider Blade and Kamen Rider Kiva have a recurring spider monster. Admittedly these are just People in Rubber Suits with spider heads and maybe legs sticking out the back. However, Kamen Rider Ryuki and Kamen Rider Hibiki went all the way, with proper giant spiders by way of CGI. Kamen Rider ZO had one that was made with Claymation, featuring a creepy face and unnatural movements that make it so much more scary than the better-animated versions.
- The UK kids' game show Knightmare had Ariadne, a very slow, very large spider who could block the path and eat the dungeoneer.
- In the Merlin episode "The Poisoned Chalice" Arthur is trapped in a cave with a bunch of giant spiders. They aren't as big as some of the beasties on this page, but they are bigger than his head — not counting the legs. Oh, and there's hundreds of them.
- Monster Warriors: The first monster Von Steinhauer unleashes upon capital City is a giant spider in "The Giant Spider Invasion".
- Guest star Raquel Welch has a dance number with a giant spider in an episode of The Muppet Show.
- Power Rangers and Super Sentai:
- Power Rangers Mystic Force also has a CGI giant spider in one episode, complete with giant web. It wasn't even the Monster of the Week, just a denizen of a dangerous forest.
- Spidertron (Dora Tarantula in Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger) from Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, on the other hand, was a monster of the week. Rita, being a Witch with a Capital "B", created it upon discovering Zack had a fear of spiders. Zack bored its guts out with the Dragonzord Fighting Mode's Power Staff.
- Arachnofiend from Season 3 of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, who was Tsuchigumo in Ninja Sentai Kakuranger. Another Tsuchigumo appeared in Shuriken Sentai Ninninger, renamed Tangleweb for Power Rangers Ninja Steel.
- Gozunagumo from Samurai Sentai Shinkenger is based on the Ushi-Oni mentioned below. He was renamed Arachnitor for Power Rangers Samurai.
- Primeval had giant prehistoric spiders in its second episode. It's pointed out that, technically, they're not really spiders, but spider ancestors. They are not, however, the most threatening monster in the episode. A giant millipede is.
- An episode of The Really Wild Show had a spoof monster movie, in which the show's pet tarantula grew to the size of a building. This being an Edutainment Show, of course, it was followed by an explanation of why you couldn't really get spiders that big.
- When Phill Jupitus nominated "people who aren't scared of spiders" to go into Room 101, the illustrative prop was a fake spider a foot in diameter which, rather than Paul producing it from behind the desk, was lowered from the ceiling while they were talking. Jupitus, who is severely arachnophobic, had a genuine moment of panic, before realising, and commenting "It's a big comedy one and all, what kind of twat am I? Big, googly-eyed, cartoon spider, I run a mile."
- Within the Sanctuary story, Big Bertha is an earth-moving, psychically powered, possible divine version of this. Yeah, it's pretty damn cool.
- The Twilight Zone (1985): In "The Elevator", a spider ate the super food developed by Roger and Will's father in order to solve world hunger. It then killed the smaller but still giant cat and dog and possibly the giant rats. When Roger and Will call the elevator in their father's factory, the giant spider grabs them with its pedipalps and kills them.
- Ultra Series examples:
- Ultra Q has a giant tarantula inhabiting an abandoned mansion, who is simply named... Giant Tarantula.
- An episode of Ultraseven has the TDF getting stranded in a monster infested swamp, with Soga being pursued by an oversized arachnid creature called a Gumonga. The creature's name is a direct reference to the Godzilla foe, Kumonga.
- The Ultraman Nexus kaiju Banpira is a giant bipedal spider with four arms. Like all the Space Beasts, Banpira likes To Serve Man, but it is also able to cloak its presence by creating Ominous Fog. From there, it incapacitates prey with a sonic shriek before snatching targets with webbing from its mouth and then erasing survivors' memories with a flash of light from its eyes. Sweet dreams...
- Giant melon-sized spiders called "Mesothelae" appeared in the Carboniferous segment of Walking with Monsters. They were larger than any genuine spiders of that (or any) time, and were only depicted as being so huge because a proto-scorpion had been mistaken for a spider; otherwise, this would be listed under Real Life.
- Episode 12 of the UK version of Who Wants to Be a Superhero? featured one terrorising various London landmarks and the superheroes' task was to mix a formula to shrink it.
- In The Wild Wild West episode "The Night of the Raven", James West and a Native American princess are menaced by a spider while shrunk. That's right, the series did a Giant Spider scene (more or less) 33 years before The Movie (cited elsewhere).
Music
- Frank Zappa was a huge fan of B-movies, especially monster movies, and thus giant spiders appear a lot in his work, including "Cheepnis" on Roxy & Elsewhere and "Spider Of Destiny" on Sleep Dirt.
Mythology and Religion
- The Tsuchigumo and Jorogumo youkai of Japanese mythology, both of which are also known for shapeshifting and illusions, along with deadly poisons and large webs which they used to catch their prey. Archetypal myths for both involve posing as a beautiful girl or young boy to attract and snare unwary travellers, or accosting and offering wishes or marriage to someone who is kind to spiders. The latter is actually fairly common, since jorogumo's natural form is considered lucky for its bright coloring.
- The Ushi-Oni is sometimes described as a giant spider with crab-like claws and a bull's head.
- Natives of the Congo jungles and cryptozoologists tell tales of a species of monkey-sized trapdoor spiders known as J'ba Fofi ("Giant Spider" in Bakongo).
- In Greek Mythology we have Arachne, a weaver of extraordinary talent who once challenged Athena with her work. Ironically, Arachne was turned into a spider by the angry goddess for her arrogance; some other versions instead have it that Arachne saw that she couldn't compare to Athena and hanged herself (or was about to) and Athena turned her into a spider so that she could keep weaving, out of pity rather than as a punishment. A lot of art depicts Arachne as either human with spider features or a giant spider altogether.
- Anansi, the West African Trickster God (later a part of Caribbean folklore due to the Slave Trade), was depicted either as a spider (his name means "spider"), a man, or a man-sized spider.
- Areop-Enap, the Creator God of Nauruan mythology, is a gigantic spider.
Pinball
- Krull has the Crystal Spider, who dwells on the upper playfield to trap players.
Podcasts
- Holland, the "large brown spider"-turned-Dash Two monster from episode 5 of Find Us Alive. He's described as being about the size of a large dog.
- In Jemjammer, the first monsters the group encounter is a trio of giant spiders. This is just a taste of the neogi, giant alien spiders that can control minds and breed by having their young burst from their corpses. The party has to fight them after they attack Alana's ship. The fact that Jylliana (and to a lesser degree her player Annie) are arachnophobic doesn't help.
- In Trials & Trebuchets, the party battle a Retriever, a giant mechanical spider, during the Autumn's End duels.
Radio
- In Fit the Eleventh of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978), Zaphod and Ford enter a hanger full of Techno Wreckage and huge cobwebs. A huge spider briefly lands next to them and says "'scuse me" in a "Boris the Spider" voice before scuttling off.
- In the Lights Out Everybody episode "The Spider," two small-time down-on-their-luck thugs scour the Amazon basin for exotic butterflies, looking to make enough money to get back to the States. Instead, they spot a dog-sized spider, which appears to be their ticket out. But there's a problem...
Tabletop Games
- 13th Age: Phase spiders reportedly hail from some parallel dimension of giants where they are merely little pests. In the Dragon Empire, everyone is bite-sized to them.
- Arduin:
- The Greater Demon Calyandagg the Lord of the Spiders is a spider the size of a Greyhound bus. He does devastating damage in close combat, including a acid-like venom that he can inject with his fangs and well as a Super Spit.
- The Snow Spider can grow nearly as large as a full-grown horse and their poison can cause permanent blindness.
- Spiga are spiders with glowing ruby red eyes that can grow as large as a school bus. Their forelegs can inflict 1-36 Hit Points of damage per hit and their bite does 1-48 Hit Points damage.
- Star Spiders are about 10-12 feet wide and long. They have 5-24 13 feet long Combat Tentacles that each do 1-12 Hit Points of damage on a hit and 4-16 Hit Points of constriction damage thereafter. They can swallow human-sized targets whole, and opponents that are sucked or pulled into their mouths are destroyed by heat and radiation at a rate of 51-100 Hit Points per combat round, which also consumes the victim's soul. They have a single glaring red eye like the headlamp of a giant train.
- Giant Tarantulas are black, hairy spiders 6-8 feet long with a leg span of up to 24 feet. Their venom inflicts nerve damage for up to 10 melee rounds and causes intense, debilitating pain.
- Web Widows are giant black widow spiders (up to seven feet long) that can cast illusion spells. Their bite injects a venom that does 31-50 Hit Points of damage and paralyzes the victim.
- Battlelords Of The Twenty Third Century: In the Shadis magazine #23 adventure "Bug Hunt", the PCs have to fight the giant Spiders of the planet Driscoll VII. Adults are up to 2.5 meters tall and weigh up to 300 kg.
- Burning Wheel: In the Monster Burner book, one of the playable monster races is the Great Spiders, which are spiders of human intelligence that range from the size of a medium-sized dog to that of a horse (depending on breed and life-path). Most are loners (like real spiders) and the ones that aren't are either pack hunters or Evil (although that is not a barrier to playing a characters in Burning Wheel, where campaigns as one of the horde of the Evil Overlord is a viable option.)
- Call of Cthulhu: In the Dreamlands supplement, Leng Spiders can grow to gigantic size and weigh hundreds of tons.
- Chaosium's supplement All the Worlds' Monsters Volume III:
- Demon Spiders are the size of a large timber wolf and can cast webs that inflict fire damage and Vampiric Draining of Life Energy. Their ruler, the Demon Spider Lord Ishral is twice the size of a man.
- The 11th level Basic Demon takes the form of a giant spider that lives in a web of darkness.
- The Rainbow Demon is a huge spider (36-360 Hit Points) whose legs are colored red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and clear. Each leg has a special power: four of them can reflect missiles, Breath Weapons, clerical magic, and all magic.
- A variety of semi-normal giant spiders: Black Widow (10-foot leg spread), Fiddle (8-foot leg spread), Giant (4-5 feet tall), Red (giant size, drains its victim's Constitution by hitting it with one of its claws), Trap Door (size of a Great Dane).
- City of 7 Seraphs: The veryx are a species of human- to halfling-sized arachnids.
- The Dark Eye: Maraskan tarantulas, Familiars available to the Black Widow coven of witches, are poisonous spiders with a diameter of two meters or more.
- Deadlands: There are are fifty-foot giant spiders that hunt openly, and man-sized ones that hide under the ground and pull you into their burrows.
- Dragon Quest: Ares magazine #13 adventure "The Treasure of Socantri" has, as one of the new monsters included, a man-sized intelligent spider covered with long hair and capable of casting many spells of Earth Magic.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Spiders are sacred to the drow's goddess Lolth, so not only do the drow have a spider motif by association, they've bred several varieties of giant spider to use as mounts or attack animals. Drow who have failed their goddess in some way or another are sometimes transformed into driders or masses of spider legs called chwidenchas, while Lolth's realm in the Abyss, the Demonweb Pits, is home to absolutely enormous spiders called Demonweb Terrors.
- Other races of the Underdark, such as the duergar dwarves or the ettercaps — themselves spider-headed, web-weaving humanoids — similarly use giant spiders as mounts.
- Giant spiders in the Classic D&D game (Basic, Expert, etc.) were a bit more varied than in other versions of D&D, and often had interesting abilities based on Truth in Television, such as crab spiders blending into their surroundings, or folklore, like the "tarantella"'s poison causing a spastic "dance."
- Bebiliths are quite literally demonic spiders, known for hunting other demons. The "normal" variant has a body the size of a plow horse and legs over four meters long, and they get bigger from there.
- Blackspawn stalkers are one variety of Spawn of Tiamat, a web-weaving, acid-spitting combination of giant spider and black dragon.
- Blade spiders are by and large normal giant spiders, except that their legs and pedipalps end in sharp metal blades.
- Bristle spiders are huge (an in-game size category for creatures around the girth of a giant) spiders that live in thick jungles. They can spit acidic poison and shoot their needlelike bristles in untargeted barrages.
- Grim puppeteers are jungle-dwelling giant spiders that, after they've drained their victims dry of fluids, string up their remains like marionettes with their silk, climb up a tree, and use their macabre puppets to lure passersby within striking range.
- Harpoon spiders are arachnoid aberrations with disturbingly human eyes encircling a spiderlike head. They hunt by firing their adhesive-coated fangs at prey, reeling in their target via fleshly lines, injecting them with a paralytic venom, and then impaling their helpless victim upon the spines covering their body. They're also fully sapient and capable of speech and known for having morbid conversations with their food while it "ripens" on their spines.
- Phase spiders are two-eyed, man-sized spiders capable of shifting between the Material and Ethereal Planes, hence the name. They observe and stalk prey from the Ethereal Plane undetected, then shift to the Material to attack seemingly from nowhere, and either hit-and-run or drag their food back with them to the Ethereal to feed.
- Retrievers are giant robot demon spiders that can shoot lasers from their eyes. Demon lords use them to hunt down those who displease or offend them.
- Tomb spiders are horse-sized arachnids suffused with negative energy and have a disturbing life cycle. They specifically lay their eggs in humanoid corpses, then wrap the body in silk to create a "web mummy," which is then animated by negative energy and serves its creator as a guardian. Once the eggs inside the undead husk hatch, the newborn tomb spiders feed on the corpse, then each other, until one emerges as a fully-grown adult in a few weeks. If the web mummy is destroyed before then, it releases a Spider Swarm of tiny tomb spiders. Oh, and tomb spider venom causes victims to be hurt by cure wounds spells and healed by inflict wounds spells, as if they were an undead creature.
- Curse of Strahd: An entire nest of giant spiders can be found in the ruins of Argynvostholt. They also are among many random encounters the player can have in their travels.
- ElfQuest: In the Chaosium RPG, adventure "Lord of the Spiders'', the PCs must explore a forest filled with huge spiders. The spiders' venom puts the victim into suspended animation, after which the victims are webbed up and hung from trees.
- Encounter Critical:
- The main rules have giant spiders as monsters. Each has from 3-60 Hit Points and can do 1-20 Hit Points of damage (plus poison) on a hit, which is more than most monsters.
- Supplement Asteroid 1618. Inside the Vanishing Pyramid the PCs can find eggsacs laid by a giant spider. If the eggsacs are broken open (from prodding or gunfire) 1-20 baby spiders will emerge and attack the PCs. If PCs kill any of them the mother spider will go Mama Bear on them.
- Exalted includes these among the variety of creatures in Creation. Some are mundane animals that just happen to be huge; others are smaller but intelligent, malicious elementals called Wood Spiders. Then there are the pattern spiders, the mechanical gods that maintain the Loom of Fate. And then there are anhules, a category of demon. No, not race, category. As in, "there's at least one subspecies of them descended from each Yozi because Yozi are jerks like that."
- Fate has giant spiders as monsters. They're no longer present as you progress to deeper levels of the dungeon.
- Godforsaken: If the Spider Collective wishes, it can take a few thousand (or more) spiders and have them form a huge spider-shaped mass that can act as a single enormous spider.
- Gods of the Fall:
- Isaleran's fungal fields are under constant threat by giant spiders, which apparently desire mushrooms more than life.
- The Spider Wood is infested with spiders of all kinds, including giant spiders.
- GURPS Space Atlas 4: Winterjewel is an Ice Planet whose dominant life form is a gigantic spider. It looks like a huge tarantula with white fur and weighs seventy pounds.
- Heart Of The Sunken Lands: Giant Spiders will always attack unless they're outnumbered. Their venom causes either paralysis for 1-6 days or a coma. While their prey is helpless they wrap it in webbing and carry it off to eat later.
- Hollow Earth Expedition. One type of monster PCs can encounter inside the Hollow Earth are giant meat-eating arachnids that are 10 feet long (not including the legs). They hunt like normal spiders, injecting a paralyzing poison with their bite and cocooning the prey to eat later.
- Tabletop Game/Ironclaw: Two of the sample wild creatures in the Omnibus are the Damhánalla, a spider about the size of a human head, and the nastier Tarantella, which is even bigger.
- It Came From The Late Late Show:
- Main rules: Giant Spiders are Monsters that are 15 feet long and act like normal wolf (hunting) spiders. They bite their prey and poison it, then drink its blood.
- Supplement It Came from the Late, Late Show II, adventure "Bjorn on the Bayou, or Escape from Alkatrazz XII": Alkatrazz XII is a prison planet that is mostly covered with swamps and forest. One of the alien monsters that can be encountered there is a giant spider.
- Lejendary Adventures. Jumping spiders are about twice as large as a human being and web spiders can be as much as 40 inches wide. They both inject a dangerous venom.
- In Nomine: Arachnidae, a dreamscape created by the dreams of spiders, is inhabited mainly by the dreaming selves of the sleeping arachnids that sustain it — with the caveat that common spiders appear as large as a human, while more substantial species are quite a lot bigger.
- Numenera:
- Ghost crabs are a species of spiders that average about one meter across and can grow as large as a meter and a half.
- Steel spiders are the size of a dinner platter, and spin thin webs made of metal.
- The dearth spiders of Swarmstar are human-sized and live in large colonies, building webs hundreds of yards.
- Noculters are spiderlike creatures with bodies nearly as large as humans that hunt the Storm Layer.
- Pathfinder:
- Shriezyx resemble monstrous spiders three feet in height. Shriezyx queens can reach a solid eight.
- Second Edition introduces the Anadi, a playable race of man-sized wolf spiders who mostly live in the Mwangi Expanse. Fully aware that most people are rather afraid of Giant Spiders, nearly every Anadi that lives near humanoids has been taught magic to take a Human form at will.
- Rocket Age: Some species of Venusian spiders have bodies up to a metre in diameter, with legs potentially even longer.
- Rolemaster Shadow World supplement Jaiman: Land of Twilight. The H'taan is a huge spider that lives in ancient ruins and other rocky, remote locations. They dig holes like a trap door spider and lie in ambush, paralyzing victims with their venom. They grow up to thirty feet or more across.
- RuneQuest:
- Into the Troll Realms, adventure "Skyfall Lake": Crab City has spiders that are as large as a mammoth. They have warty gray skin and drop pools of acid.
- Dorastor: Land of Doom: Of the Spider Folk who live in the Spider Woods, the largest type are the Great Mother Spiders. They can reach a Size of 54, which means they weigh just less than 7,000 lb.
- Supplement Trollpak, "Book of Uz" part 2: The trolls have domesticated several types of giant spiders. The largest ones weigh more than 6,000 lbs.
- Shadow of the Demon Lord: The Spider Wood is a forest filled with various kinds of oversized spiders, including a Cannibal Tribe of Spider People.
- Sorcery And Super Science Post Apocalyptic Role Playing: The Scritch are spider-like creatures that are about 2 feet across and can spit poison. There are unconfirmed rumors that they can grow as large as a small pony.
- The Strange:
- The night spiders of Ardeyn measure two meters in diameter.
- A monument spider's legs can stretch almost 152 meters from tip to tip.
- Xyz'pln is like a spider, if a spider were large enough to span a miles-wide space.
- Tails of Equestria: Giant spiders are included in the bestiary. They live deep underground by preference, and detest both fire and bright light. They often live in large nests or colonies led by a larger queen. In The Festival of Lights, they are the main antagonists due to the spider-queen Insidira deciding that she's tired of ruling only over caverns and planning to take over the Underground City of Umberfoal and then move on to the surface world.
- Warhammer:
- Necromunda:
- The Hive Cities of Necromunda are infamous for their giant spiders that can range in size from several feet across to larger than a man. Species include the long-legged wolf spiders, the stealthy orb spidersnote and the amphibious sump spiders that have precious gems for eyes.
- In the 3rd Edition of the game, the technologically proficient House Van Saar are known to capture, breed, and cybernetically enhanced Necromundan giant spiders for various purposes. In-game, Van Saar gangs can purchase these cyberarchnids as pets from the Campaign Trading Post.
- Warhammer 40,000: Canoptek Spyders are floating robot spiders responsible for overseeing and repairing Necron Tomb Complexes while their masters sleep in stasis. Even the smallest of Canoptek Spyders are larger than a human and there have even been a few encounters with such constructs, known as Tomb Stalkers, that equal or exceed the size of the Imperium’s largest Humongous Mecha.
- In Warhammer Fantasy and its sequel Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, Forest Goblins and Spiderfang Grots respectively ride giant spiders into battle with the rank and file riding spiders about twice their size while their bosses ride spiders twice as big as those of their followers. The largest spiders fielded by these tribes are the arachnarok spiders, spiders so massive that they can be fitted with howdahs bearing catapults or primitive shrines.
- Necromunda:
- The World of Darkness:
- Werewolf: The Apocalypse includes a race of blood-sucking werespiders called Ananasi. One of their forms is indeed a spider one-and-a-half times their human weight, and about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. Their other forms are human (with a few spider internal organs), spider-human hybrid monster, and an entire swarm of normal-sized spiders linked by a hive-mind. In that form, they can survive the death of any number of spiders, as long as one is left — though losing a lot will change their appearance and personality. Regular Ananasi are sinister and emotionless, but the Kumo of East Asia are sadistic, insane, and evil.
- Werewolf: The Forsaken features giant spiders known as Azlu, which are bizarre spirit hybrids. They start off small and looking mostly like natural spiders, and feed themselves on regular spiders and other Azlu. When they get big enough they start targeting humans and either eat their brains and ride around in their heads, or (when bigger) suck the body empty and wear the skin. When they get big enough, they often resemble a hideous combination of human and spider parts and will be covered in poisonous spines and fangs. They eat humans, spirits, and the occasional werewolf. When they get big enough, they stop being able to pass as human, but often gain the ability to lay eggs, either eating the young or letting them grow into a family to bring it more prey. On top of all that if they are killed they split into dozens of their original form, which all have to be killed to prevent them from growing into new Azlu.
Theme Parks
- The Dungeon of Terror haunted house from Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights had a six-foot spider dangling down at the guests.
Toys
- BIONICLE: The Visorak horde, made up of car-sized spiders. There are also the elite Visorak, the humongous Kahgarak spiders, several stories high. Also, a variety of giant spider-like Rahi qualify as well, like the Chute Lurker, the Sea Spider, and Vezon's steed Fenrakk.
- BIONICLE (2015) had the Skull Spiders. They are about the size of a Toa's head, but their leader, the Lord of the Skull Spiders, is the size of a small house (though his toy is about the size of a Toa figure and is definitely way shorter). Some of the Skull Spiders have scorpion-like tails and like the Visorak, they are four-legged. The Lord has six legs.
Webcomics
- Abe & Kroenen: Rasputin tries to capture a giant spider for his own use. It's later found out that its name is Starbuck and belongs to Davy Jones.
- A Beginner's Guide to the End of the Universe: While exploring the caves on the Dark Star, the Everyman is ambushed by a giant wolf spider as large as he is.
- Daddy-Long-Legs: Mr. Scapegrace stands more than twice as tall as a human. However, while he is a cellar spider, he stands that tall because he is a Beast Man and standing on his fourth pair of legs, having hands on the others.
- El Goonish Shive: Elliot initially mistakes the Bloodgrem for one of these after seeing its many spider-like eyes.
- Girl Genius:
- The Geisterdamen ride ghost spiders, pale spiders several meters tall and with very long, slender legs. This is actually one of the least creepy things about the Geisterdamen.
- There's a different one in Castle Heterodyne, which while not being much bigger than a real-life tarantula is still able to completely envelop an adult human in webs in a few seconds.
- Homestuck: Trolls are raised by alien monsters called lusii naturae; Vriska's is a spider the size of a house. She is also responsible for feeding it. It's outright stated that she Eats Babies.
- Nature of Nature's Art: Since it's about spiders, Lycos] usually averts this trope; pretty much all of the spiders who appear are their actual sizes. Then the trope gets inverted with Patu digua (one of the world's smallest spiders), and then played straight with... none other than Theraphosa blondi (the above-mentioned Goliath Birdeater Tarantula), who dwarfs the titular spider. Three guesses why this page scared the crap out of some readers.
- Squid Row: What your imagination will do to you.
- Tales of the Questor: Quentyn reveals that his marvelous silken cloak is woven from the silk of biomancy enhanced spiders the size of tomatoes. (canonically, they are literally too large to walk on their own, and have to be hand-fed by their handlers.) Sam is not enthused.
- Wasted Talent plays with this.
- xkcd: In strip #1530 "Keyboard Mash", a giant spider ties up a human, and then tries to impersonate that human online.
Web Original
- The osteopods in Alien Biospheres are genetically distinct from true spiders due to evolving on a different planet, but their eight legs, six eyes, mandibles, pedipalps, and cephalothorax cause them to look the part.
- "Giant Spider Invasion". A guy finds a pretty big spider in his backyard, so he sprays insecticide all over his house and on the spider... only it turns out he picked up insectisteroids instead. Then the all-grown-up spider invades his house and kills him.
- This particularly famous Jerma985 clip. Complete with beatboxing!
- In the Kriegs Maiden novel universe, there's a series of spider-type Kriegsmaiden. The most infamous is the Widow, which doesn't look humanoid at all, and can have a leg span longer than the average car!
- Downplayed but still present with the titular character of Lucas the Spider. He is far larger than any real species of jumping spider, which tend to be a few millimeters in size, where as Lucas seems to be around 3 inches long.
- Oddly toyed with in Mortasheen. You'd think the human-insect hybrid Arthropoid class of creatures would have one, but in actuality, the spider-based creatures they have there aren't all that big and tend to look more like humans with weirdly spidery proportions (the biggest one looks more ape-like than anything else). There is a monster that fits this trope, though oddly enough it's actually a weird cow thing designed to produce meat.
- In Mother of Learning, the aranea are a somewhat downplayed example — Zorian's narration describes them as being the size of his chest. They're still pretty scary, though, not in the least because they are a species of mind-mages.
- One of the various terrors beset on Noah Maxwell at the Victor Park Boardwalk is this, as well as one of the various forms of the Administrator.
- SCP Foundation:
- SCP-278 ("A Large Mechanical Spider"). SCP-278 is a giant robotic spider. When it escaped confinement, it was covered up as a new performance artpiece (see "La Princesse" in the Real Life section).
- SCP-940 ("Araneae Marionettes"). SCP-940 is a spider-like creature with a leg span up to 7 meters across.
- SCP-2507 ("A Web Of Cliques"). SCP-2507 are spider-like creatures with an average weight of 45 kilograms (~100 pounds) and average height of 3 meters (~10 feet).
- SCP-2922 ("Notes From the Under"). SCP-PC-005, "The Impenetrable" is a Reality Warper that lives in the afterlife known as Corbenic. It resembles a gigantic spider.
- SCP-278 ("A Large Mechanical Spider")
- This appears to be the true form of the creepy Victorian throwback villain Spider in World Domination in Retrospect, as revealed when the fight goes against him.
- Invoked in this video, in which a German Shepherd is dressed in a spider costume to prank unwary passersby.
- From what little we can see of them, the Woodcrawlers from Gemini Home Entertainment appear to be shaped similarly to spiders. They have four front legs that seem to be arachnid in shape, and they're large enough to fill up most of a doorway.
Real Life
- Mostly averted in Real Life: spiders as a whole are tiny creatures, with most of them being smaller than your fingernail.
- The biggest spider known is the South American goliath birdeater tarantula, growing to roughly 9-10" (22-25 cm) in size, this creature's relatively harmless (to humans) venom is made up for by its increased aggression compared to most tarantulae and tendency to fling clouds of irritating spines into the eyes of larger enemies. While they usually only eat the externally digested liquid remains of insects, reptiles, and amphibians they paralyze with their venom, they do occasionally manage to catch a bird (and no, they do not build giant webs to catch them with). To quote Cracked "It's frequently described as 'larger than a dinner plate,' presumably because spider-scientists don't want to freak people out with the significantly more relevant 'big enough to fit over your face.'"
- Australia is infamous for its thick concentration of huntsman spiders, which can grow to be the size of one's face. According to native Aussies, the first time you see one you scream and run away, the second you try to get rid of it, the third you just ignore it. They are venomous, but their bite is effectively harmless to any healthy human, and they keep other bugs out of the house. (The spiders, not the Australians.)
- Everybody meet the new kid in town! The Heteropoda maxima, also called the Giant Huntsman Spider is another 30 cm (12 inch) beast from Laos. It isn't as bulky as Goliath, but it definitely holds as much Nightmare Fuel for those scared of lanky, skinny spiders. It is also, as the name implies, the largest species of all Huntsman spiders.
- La Princesse, the fifty-foot spider marionette. She appeared on the side of a tower, was taken to a dock, and started roaming Liverpool and spraying people with water. She "seemed to be leading the entire population of the city on a merry dance, like some kind of arachnid Pied Piper."
- Maman, the giant pregnant spider which now menaces Ontario.
- It was once believed that a fossil arthropod from the Carboniferous, called Megarachne, was one of these. However, more recent evidence shows that the extinct creature wasn't a spider at all but in fact part of an extinct group of animals known as sea scorpions. So yes, not Giant Spiders, just Giant Scorpions. The largest sea scorpion, Jaekelopterus, reached a length of over eight feet (2.5 meters), four times as long as Megarachne. But it didn't look like a spider, so that's all right then.
- As a matter of fact, the largest known prehistoric spiders (the Jurassic Mongolarachne and the Permian Arthrolycosa) were actually smaller than the largest spiders of today, with neither exceeding 5 inches in leg span.
- Although they are not true spiders (though they are distantly related), some species of pycnogonids (also known as sea spiders) can reach 2 feet across. The largest ones tend to be found in cold, deep water so you're unlikely to encounter those kinds.
- Also, there is the Japanese spider crab. It's a kind of crab reaching 3.8 m from claw to claw and looking like a giant spider.
- A persistent urban legend holds that giant spiders were found in the summer of 2001, living near Windsor Castle. They were discovered by British Telecom workers in an underground maintenance tunnel. Entomologists initially reported that they were venomous, aggressive and possibly a type thought to have been extinct for centuries. On later examination they proved to be Meta menardi◊ cave spiders, which are notoriously nonaggressive. The colony was rehomed to a nearby forest.
- Another persistent urban legend is that of the so-called Iraqi Camel Spider. Supposedly, these creatures grow up to one foot in length, can run up to twenty-five miles an hour, make a screaming noise when they run, can jump two feet in the air, have a venom powerful enough to melt flesh, and attack and kill camels to lay their eggs in their stomachs. This has come with many claims about them attacking humans. In reality, Camel Spiders are not spiders at all but are part of a separate group of arachnids called Solifugae. They never grow beyond six inches in length, have a top speed of ten miles an hour, can't jump, and don't even produce venom. The idea that they attack camels and humans comes from their name; "Solifugae" means "flee from the sun", which is exactly what they're doing. Dead camels and humans provide shadows for them to use to get out of bright desert sunlight. And aside from all that, they're not even exclusive to the Middle East, also being native to the American Southwest.
SHE JUST WANTS TO GIVE YOU A HUG!
