Giant Spider



"And Superman needs to fight a Giant Spider in the third act. Do you know about spiders? They're the fiercest killers in the insect kingdom!"

- Producer Jon Peters on the fifth Superman movie in production around 1996/97, as related by Kevin Smith.

Arachnophobia is probably the second-most popular phobia (after coulrophobia, that most tired of plot devices), 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 Fifty Foot Whatevers to attack has to be a big spider. (Don't click the link if you like to browse All The Tropes before bed.) The bigger they are, the less likely there are to be more of them, but they're almost all so big that they logically shouldn't be able to move or breathe. They will usually have hypertoxic venom, both spin webs and hunt for prey, and spit silk out of their mouths (most spiders in real life only focus on one trait).

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 loquacious. Sometimes, they're just ordinary spiders who meet up with a protagonist who is small, although it amounts to the same thing. Crossed over with Humongous Mecha, you get the Spider Tank.

Not to be confused with Demonic Spiders, who are just difficult enemies (though sometimes a giant spider is a demonic spider), or Money Spiders, which are just enemies that have money even though they logically shouldn't (though again, Money Spiders can be literal spiders).

Compare Giant Enemy Crab.

Anime and Manga

 * The third chapter of Majin Devil 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 head.
 * Two Digimon skirt the line, namely Dokugumon(technically an insect that spins webs) and Arukenimon(who is classified as an arachnid but looks less like one than Dokugumon).
 * In the anime series Hell Girl, the Lord of Hell is in the form of a Giant Spider.
 * Giant? Hardly. The spider-form is actually pretty tiny, just big enough to see that the patterns in its back are actually eyes. Of course at the gates of Hell the lights in the sky correspond to the pattern to these eyes, but there is no sign of the spider behind them.
 * One of these accompanied Kotarou on his first battle against Negi in the Kyoto Arc of Mahou Sensei Negima. It was banished by Asuna with one swing of her Iron Fan
 * In 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 comparitively) 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.
 * Pokémon has three, and they're rather small for a trope about big spiders, but Ariados is still triple the size of a tarantula and even its former form is pretty bigger than any real spider. Galvantula is another "small giant" spider of comparable size to Ariados, but its pre-evolution is the size of a real-life tarantula.
 * Uru from Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's. Not quite as scary as some of the other examples on this page, but still very big and menacing.
 * Matarael from Neon Genesis Evangelion.
 * Spider Riders, of course.
 * Bali Lali of Bizenghast. She and the other Cleaners are all spider people.
 * In his fight with Kidimaru, Neji fights giant spiders in Naruto.

Comic Books

 * Trauma (whose superpower is turning into people's worse fears) transforms into one during a training exercise in Avengers: The Initiative #1. This turns out to be a very bad idea; the arachnophobic Armory freaks out and accidentally kills one of her teammates.
 * While not a giant spider per se, The Crimson King in the comic adapation of The Dark Tower often sports a couple of spider legs when ever he shows up.
 * A few show up in Spider-man, obviously.
 * 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.
 * This was the original intent in giving Mack Gargan the power and abilities of a scorpion.
 * To say nothing of Spider-man transforming into the Half-Human Hybrid Man-Spider on occasion.
 * The villain Org, from Jungle Comics, uses a drum to control giant spiders.
 * Don Martin pitted his comical superhero Captain Klutz against Gorgonzola, 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.
 * 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.
 * In one issue of Havoc Inc an unusually large tarantula caught Chester and Deck off guard as they were sleeping on a jungle planet. As portrayed on the cover art.

Film

 * Quite a few films of the B-Movie genre use these, whether in stop motion or just extreme close-up:
 * Planet of the Dinosaurs has a large, stop motion spider in one scene.
 * Earth vs. the Spider featured a blown-up tarantula.
 * There was a 2000s film with the same name about a guy who injected himself with spider DNA in an attempt to become a super-hero, only to mutate into a grotesque humanoid arachnid-thing that was eternally hungry and devoured people indiscriminately. Yeah, it was basically a horrifying parody of Spider-Man.
 * Eight Legged Freaks, with somewhat better special effects, is an Affectionate Parody of this type of film.
 * The Giant Spider Invasion made use of laughably bad puppetry.
 * Horrors of Spider Island has surprisingly few spiders.
 * You're just confused as to what spiders are. They're big, hairy bipeds with pants.
 * One Million Years BC very briefly featured a blown-up tarantula.
 * Tarantula featured a blown-up tarantula, although it used a model for closeups.
 * No less than three of the films listed above (Earth vs. the Spider, The Giant Spider Invasion and Horrors of Spider Island) have appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
 * The largest spider in the aptly-named film Arachnophobia is not very big compared to Kumonga, but still slightly bigger than any real spider. Even Australian ones. The real problem with the spiders in said film are their sheer numbers and insanely poisonous bite.
 * As of Son of Godzilla, Monster Island is home to Kumonga, a spider with a 164-foot legspan. Unlike most of the other examples listed here, he gets a Heel Face Turn. He shows up again in Godzilla Final Wars, still shooting his yellow webbing.
 * In The Incredible Shrinking Man, the title character encounters an ordinary-sized spider which is huge to him.
 * Peter Jackson, director of The Movie The Lord of the Rings, plied his actual arachnophobia to full use to make Shelob as horrible as possible. Strangely, Shelob had a stinger in her belly, and a gaping mouth instead of actual spider fangs.
 * The un-spider-like anatomy is from the book, too, although the mouth was a beak in the book. Since Shelob is the "last child of Ungoliant to trouble the unhappy world" and Ungoliant was not a spider, really, but an unpleasantly spider-like evil spirit from the dawn of time, we can't expect biological niceties.
 * At the end of the 1958 version of The Fly, a fly with a tiny human head—the other half of the movie's human/fly Biological Mashup—is menaced by a normal-sized spider. "Heeeelp meeeee!"
 * The Secret of NIMH had a fairly largish spider that looked enormous to the mouse protagonist.
 * Having produced the film version of Wild Wild West, one could think that producer Jon Peters included the giant metal spider as an interesting if entirely stupid sequence. However, the man has an apparent fascination with giant arachnids: Kevin Smith's story of his time working on Superman Returns (at that point known as Superman Lives) in the late '90s includes an amusing anecdote about Mr. Peters' demands on what be in the movie, which included not having Superman wear his suit or fly, and to have him fight a giant spider in the final act (Peters' justification being that "spiders are the fiercest killers in the insect kingdom").
 * Or might be if they actually were insects in the first place, as most fans of spiders ought to know already...
 * Well, from a grammatical standpoint he's right. While spiders are arachnids, the insect world, as a spider's primary and most-common prey, could view spiders as the fiercest killers in their "kingdom".
 * Peters' fascination doesn't even end there: he is known to have requested a mechanical spider be present in a film adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics as well. Rumour has it that he was at one point involved in the live-action adaptation of legendary anime movie Akira too, which conjures up terrifying mental images of Tetsuo mutating into a giant spider. Thankfully he no longer seems to be involved in the project.
 * When Peters produced The Colour Purple, Steven Spielberg apparently had it written into his contract that the guy couldn't be allowed on set. Just sayin'.
 * In all fairness to Peters's taxonomic dumbth and spider fixation... Superman fighting a giant spider on film would be awesome.
 * Also in all fairness, most of the "quotes" from Jon Peters were just from a story told by Kevin Smith. It's still unknown how much of it was exaggerated.
 * 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.
 * Ice Spiders, wherein Olympic athletes are terrorized by, you guessed it, Giant Spiders at a ski resort.
 * One of the last things to come from the Jumanji game were giant spiders. They didn't do much, as they got scared off by the earthquake in the very next turn.
 * Abu fights one in The Thief of Bagdad.
 * The 2001 Spanish production Arachnid is about a giant spider infestation on a small island near Guam.
 * In the astoundingly bad Christopher Lambert adaptation of Beowulf, Grendel's mother transforms into a spider hybrid to fight Beowulf.
 * Aahg from My Little Pony: The Movie.
 * John Cardos' 1977 epic, Kingdom of the Spiders, has pesticide killing off all bugs in Verde Valley so naturally tarantulas team up to take down humans.
 * One of the sideiplots in Krull involves a giant albino spider guarding/imprisoning an oracle in a rather comfortable-looking cocoon in a gigantic web. It moves to eat anyone coming to consult with her, and is only prevented when she pours the sands of her life away (freezing it in place while the sands are in motion).

Literature

 * Colin Wilson's Spider World novels are set in a post-apocalyptic future in which telepathic giant spiders (and other various insects) are the dominant species ruling over mankind.
 * Castle Roogna, one of Piers Anthony's earlier Xanth novels actually features a gigantic spider named Jumper as one of the two main heroes. Too bad Xanth novels got increasingly uncomfortable to read...
 * Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys has an entire army of Big Damn Spiders at the end.
 * There's a battle with giant spiders in the novel A Rustle in the Grass by Robin Hawdon, but seeing as it's a told from the point of view of ants their great size is hardly surprising. Interestingly the ant protagonist doesn't find the spiders anywhere near as terrifying as his encounter with a toad, with its natural cameoflage, ability to leap huge distances, and strike with its tongue from well out of stinging range.
 * Conan the Barbarian encountered one in the story "The Tower of the Elephant," which struck down Taurus of Nemedia, a prince of thieves, with one bite. It suffered an unfortunate death via treasure chest to the face.
 * Conan encountered giant spiders all the goddamn time. But his most famous adventure involving a giant spider was probably Conan's battle with Omm, a giant spider worshipped as a god in the city of Yezud. A later adventure had Conan fighting Omm's equally large offspring, Zath.
 * There is a spider like species of monster in the film of Stephen King's The Mist.
 * The final form of the main antagonist of King's IT is a giant spider. Well, what we can comprehend of IT's true form anyway. The book describes it as being about 15 feet tall.
 * Another one shows up in
 * Guess what the alternate form of the shapeshifting half-demon in The Dark Tower is?
 * A giant spider appears in Tarnsman of Gor; partially subverted though, in that it is civilized and can speak (with the help of Translation Device). It's not that big as giant spiders go either, although it's still pretty big for a spider. Despite averting, it plays to this trope when it assists the protagonist in a capture, pretending to want to kill the Damsel in Distress. His name is Narr and he's a relatively pleasant chap, although a bit of a fussbudget.
 * Giant space spiders are the antagonists of Philip Reeve's Steampunk novel Larklight.
 * The Harry Potter series includes creatures called Acromantulas, essentially giant spiders that can get up to elephant-size. They can talk and are sentient, but don't think you're likely to survive a conversation with one (unless you're Hagrid). They are most prominently featured in Chamber of Secrets, whose film adaptation actually specifies spiders in the BBFC content notice.
 * Aragog, the "king" Acromantula, makes a cameo (albeit posthumous) appearance in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as well... both in book and film versions, surprisingly.
 * And the spiders return in Deathly Hallows when  Presumably this will be in the film too...though some hope otherwise.
 * The Hobbit has lots of spiders about the size of a dog, who can speak. The Lord of the Rings introduces Shelob, their much larger mother. And her mother, Ungoliant, featured in The Silmarillion, is even bigger. JRR Tolkien was bitten by a tarantula in South Africa when he was a young boy; he almost died. The numerous spider-monsters in his books are probably influenced by this.
 * Although he said he remembered little beyond hot weather, long dry grass, and running, and felt no conscious dislike of spiders; he would capture and release those he found in the house. He said he began to put spiders as bad guys in his stories because one of his sons was an arachnophobe.
 * The arachnid aliens in the science fiction novel A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge.
 * Hawk, Fisher and the Special Wizardry And Tactics team fight a giant spider while traversing the sewers in The Bones Of Haven.
 * Baal in The Ancestral Trail, who was both intelligent and the size of a large house. And unlike most of the giant spiders on this list, he actually ate one of the heroes. Quite graphically too, with spurting blood and head-biting.
 * Perdido Street Station Features a psychopathic hyper-intelligent multidimensional giant spider. Brrr.
 * The Cheka in the Star Trek Deep Space Nine Relaunch books are a sapient Giant Spider species. They control the expansionist Magisterial Cheka Kingdom, in the Gamma Quadrant. Then there's the semi-sentient Comes-in-the-night-kills-many, which was essentially a giant spider wielding clubs. They're extinct, now; wiped out by the Jem'Hadar after threatening a Dominion farming colony. Finally, friendly aliens the Pak'shree resemble a cross between a Giant Spider and a giant crab or beetle.
 * In Poison, the titular character and her group must travel to the Realm of Spiders and retrieve a dagger. They encounter a gigantic spider's web, owned by an equally gigantic spider who they successfully trick. Poison then reaches a castle and finds the spider's wife, who for all intents and purposes looks like a pregnant dead woman. Later on, Poison is forced to press her hand to the spider Lady's belly, and she can feel the baby spider inside moving.
 * It's also implied that she will eat her "husband" after the baby spider is born. A giant spider will be eaten by a woman.
 * The giant Trundle spider in the Pocket Books novelisation of The Adventures of Captain Proton (the Flash Gordon-homage Show Within a Show on Star Trek: Voyager). Proton and his companions are sacrificed to the giant spider, but it tells them it's sick of the lousy diet and helps them escape instead.
 * Averted in Charlotte's Web where the titular spider is portrayed as a normal-sized (and good-natured) spider.
 * Also averted in Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends where all the spiders are normal-sized.
 * The Spider from James and the Giant Peach. She's huge, but she's also one of the nicest characters in the book and its film adaptation.
 * A spider with a twelve-foot legspan was described in Kong: A Natural History Of Skull Island.
 * In The Dresden Files novel Turn Coat, Harry is accosted by a group of intelligent, pony-sized faerie spiders while traveling through the Nevernever. They threaten to kill him, but he convinces them to back down by showing them his wizard cred by pulping the apparent leader of the group with a force spell. Later on,
 * Spider aliens attempt to heat up the Earth in John Lymington's Night of the Big Heat.
 * Arachne is a character in the Alex Verus series. The books describe her as a 'tarantula the size of a minivan'. Unusually for this trope she's extremely nice and helpful, and also makes really good clothes.
 * Arachne is a character in the Alex Verus series. The books describe her as a 'tarantula the size of a minivan'. Unusually for this trope she's extremely nice and helpful, and also makes really good clothes.

Live Action TV

 * Doctor Who has the Giant Spiders of Metebelis 3 and the Racnoss. Their empress was half humanoid though.
 * 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).
 * 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.
 * Some seasons of Kamen Rider feature a spider monster in the first episode, and more recent seasons like Blade and 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 Conspicuous 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.
 * 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 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.
 * The UK kid's game show Knightmare had Ariadne, a very slow, very large spider who could block the path and eat the dungoneer.
 * Primeval had giant prehistoric spiders in its second episode. It's pointed out that, technically, they're not really spiders. They are not, however, the most threatening monster in the episode.
 * The Buffy episode "Selfless" started out with one of these.
 * Within the Sanctuary story, Big Bertha is  version of this. Yeah, it's pretty damn cool.
 * The Monster of the Week in the Charmed episode "Spin City".
 * In the Merlin episode "The Poisoned Chalice" Arthur in 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.

Radio

 * The radio version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy briefly featured a Giant Spider as a Shout-Out to "Boris the Spider."

Mythology

 * 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.

Tabletop Games

 * Dungeons & Dragons features spiders of variable enormous size.
 * The Underdark is home to the Drow, who worship an evil spider goddess, and sometimes end up as Driders.
 * Variants include mechanical spiders, spiders that move through the astral plane, various kinds of really poisonous spiders, psychic spiders, werespiders and so on and so forth.
 * Spelljammer has Clockwork Horrors - spidery Mechanical Lifeform that tend to strip-mine planets to build more of its own and tear apart or shoot (they come equipped with dart-spitters, more advanced types with Death Ray) any pesky critters who object to this.
 * Naturally, this also applies to any video game directly based on DnD, namely Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights.
 * Let's not forget the Bebiliths, quite literally Demonic Spiders. The normal variant has a body the size of a plow horse and over 4 metres leg span. Let it be noted that a Bebilith is an Arachnid demon that hunts OTHER DEMONS!
 * 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 Truth in Television (crab spiders blending into their surroundings) or folklore-inspired abilities (the "tarantella"'s poison causing a spastic "dance") to make them interesting.
 * Magic: The Gathering has several spiders as creature cards, and they're usually able to block creatures with flying (presumably due to scaled-up webs). The first was actually called "Giant Spider."
 * Giant Spider is not the biggest Spider in the game, either. Goliath Spider is. It's a 7/6 and its illustration is it eating a drake. There's also Plated Spider, which has the amusing flavor text "Most spiders wait patiently for their prey to arrive. Most spiders aren't forty feet tall."
 * The card, Giant Spider, is now the only card that has been in every base set ever printed.
 * Necron Tomb Spyders from Warhammer 40,000, as well as Humongous Mecha versions called Tomb Stalkers that mop the floor with the Imperium's largest and best-armed Emperor-class Titans.
 * Also the Mutant Spiders in Necromunda, which can range from the size of a large dog to the size of an elephant, and have diamonds for eyes. Good luck getting one though, as they're the Alpha Predator deep in the Underhive, where they stride upon a literal sea of toxic waste.
 * Don't forget the ones ridden by forest goblins in Warhammer Fantasy.
 * Forest Goblins in Warhammer Fantasy Battle can ride giant spiders into battle.
 * Normal forest goblins ride spiders about twice thier size, forest goblin bosses however ride spiders twice as big as those spiders.
 * And then theres the arachnorok spiders, a spider so massive that goblins can attach full-size rok lobbers to them.
 * The New World of Darkness 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.
 * In the old WOD, Werewolf: The Apocalypse includes a race of werespiders known as the Ananasi, and one of their forms is indeed a spider that is one and a half times their human weight, and about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.
 * In the Monster Burner book for the Burning Wheel system one of the 'playable' monster races was the Great Spiders which were spiders of human intelligence that ranged from the size of a medium sized dog to that of a horse (depending on breed and life-path). Most were loners (like real spiders) and the ones that weren't were 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.)
 * 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). But, there is a monster that fits this trope, though oddly enough it's actually a weird cow thing designed to produce meat.

Toys

 * Bionicle has 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.

Video Games
"Becky: All the other Fortunatas were all TOTALLY like 'Tarantula Program? Eeew!' And then they were like, 'Like, what are you thinking, Becky?' And I was totally like 'I'll get to meet all kinds of interesting people and stuff.'"
 * "XP granted for befriending a giant magical spider!"
 * To elaborate, NWN 2 has a rare example of a friendly giant spider. Your party comes across it in a cave, and it tries to communicate with you by drawing letter in the dirt with it's legs. If you befriend it, then later on, it will show up in the basement and eventually weave a magical spider-silk cloak for you!
 * Elvira had not one but TWO first-person graphic adventures/RPGs for the PC. In the second game, there was a level devoted to horror with an insect theme. Of course it had a Giant Spider. It doesn't get that freaky until it gets RIGHT UP INTO YOUR FACE. I saw it on a YouTube video devoted to the scariest games ever.
 * Most MMOs will have you fighting giant spiders at some point, especially MMOs in a fantasy setting.
 * In City of Heroes, Giant Spiders took the form of psychic women who undergo massive surgery and augmentation to be installed in a robotic spider bodies. Most of them don't seem to mind though.

"Short-term symptoms: Complete paralysis. Being eaten by the GCS. Long-term Symptoms: None, not that it really matters."
 * In fact, about half the Arachnos forces were spider-droids or humans cyborged into spiders of one form or another.
 * And then, there was the Jade Spider, a giant robotic monster that rampages through the Siren's Call zone at the end of a couple task forces.
 * Cute Knight Kingdom requires you to fight one for one of the endings.
 * Dark Messiah has giant spiders, from the size of a dog to one really huge one. The big one is creepifying, the little ones are horror incarnate as they leap onto your face and body, poisoning you making it hard to see the rest of them, in the dark. There's a whole temple you have to visit devoted to a deity of order who's avatar was a spider. Oh god...
 * Radiant Historia And you will hate them. And the Bonus Boss is one also...twice!
 * Devil May Cry features Phantom, a giant tarantuala made out of Lava, with a scorpion tail, as a Recurring Boss. He even showed up in Devil May Cry 2.
 * The first game also featured Kyklopses; smaller spiders made out of rock. And by smaller, I mean compared to the tank-sized Phantom. They were still about as long as Dante was tall.
 * Devil May Cry 3 features Arachnes, basically a freakish mermaid; except replace the fish part with a spider part.
 * The Final Boss of the first Doom game, the Spider Mastermind, and its progeny in Doom 2, the arachnotrons. Neither of these have eight legs.
 * Doom 3 has the the Trites, multilegged, swarming horrors with basketball-sized bodies. It also has the Vagaries, creatures with a woman-like upper body and spidery lower halves. They can use Psychic Powers to toss objects at you and seem to serve as brood mothers to the Trites.
 * Dungeon Siege has quite a few spidery enemies, including Drider-esque humanoid-hybrid ones called mucosas (with an annoying habit of shrieking loudly when they attack) and an extra-large giant spider Mini Boss.
 * EverQuest has the aptly named Terrorantula. Who is to put it mildly FRAKKIN HUGE!
 * It's still around in EQ2. To give some impression of the scale involved: That refracted image in the center of the shot? That's a player character. Some of the smaller spiders are almost as tall as her horse.
 * World of Warcraft included Terokkantula as a Shout-Out.
 * Not even Thrym's shoe is big enough! KILL IT WITH FIRE!
 * The Exile/Avernum series has several varieties of giant spiders. There are generic giant ones, evil spellcasting ones, and the Giant Intelligent Friendly Talking Spiders. They're Cloudcuckoolanders, all named Spider, and so annoying they frequently drive people insane. "You're cute!"
 * The first real boss of Final Fantasy X-2 is Boris, a giant spider-crab hybrid. Its name is actually a reference to a fan favourite The Who song called "Boris the Spider", so is its special attack "Sticky End" ("He's come to a sticky end / Don't think he will ever mend") and a part of its entry in the bestiary ("Maybe he's as scared as me / Where's he gone now, I can't see").
 * The third and fourth forms of the Dark King in Final Fantasy Mystic Quest are that of a giant spider.
 * Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones has 2 types of these: Bael and Elder Bael. They usually carry poison. Notable as they have the same Stat Caps. Also notable, they're Demonic, especially the first one you encounter, which must either be fought by your Peg Knight or carefully kited after rescuing the helpless civilians.
 * Guild Wars has many types of giant spiders in its large bestiary, most of them about human-sized. One dungeon in the fourth chapter, Arachni's Haunt, has the party fighting their way through spider-infested caverns to face the eponymous spider-queen boss at the end. Besides fighting against spiders, Rangers can tame giant spiders to fight beside them (after a fairly difficult quest to reach the tamable ones).
 * The race known as the Machaka in Illwinter's Dominions 3 both have and are capable of becoming these.
 * The Immortal has one, that like most things in the game, will kill you in one web-tangling instant. However, even worse are her egg sacks scattering the level. These unleash hordes of baby spiders if you happen to touch them, and...well, in the words of Slowbeef, "Why would they INCLUDE something like that?"
 * While spider enemies have always had bit parts in the Zelda games, it wasn't until The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time's Skulltula-laden first dungeon and the Queen Gohma that spiders in the series really took off.
 * Majora's Mask has giant invisible spiders under the Ikana graveyard.
 * Twilight Princess took this even further with its sixth dungeon, which was packed to bursting with the things, and the boss being the biggest of the lot of course - Armogohma is MASSIVE. And then, when you defeat the giant spider, its body disintegrates and its large, central eye becomes another spider, surrounded by hundreds of tiny little spiders... and they swarm chaotically around the room...
 * Giant spiders are one of the most common enemies in the rail shooter Let's Go Jungle!.
 * The first boss in Okami, as well as the Bonus Boss Bandit Spider.
 * And the Block Spider.
 * The Resident Evil universe features spiders mutated by the T-Virus, who grow to the size of cars.
 * Then you have the Black Tiger. Apparently giant huntsmans were not scary enough so Capcom had to come up with a freaky redesign based on Australian funnelwebs to make your S.T.A.R.S commando shit their pants. Seriously, the games peaked the fright factor here.
 * One section of Resident Evil 5 has normal, non mutated spiders. While accurately portraying African arachnids, they're about the size of Chris' fist. The game acttually keeps tabs on how many you kill like any other enemy, so by all means squish'em.
 * To be precise, most of the games have giant tarantulas (called "Webspinners" in the in-game media). Code: Veronica has giant Black Widows instead, while Darkside Chronicles not only has lovingly rendered and even more ghastly Webspinners and Black Widows, but a South American version, the Jumping Maneater, which is made from, you guessed it, a jumping spider. Amusingly, they're all depicted as retaining their original proportions; even though they're all Giant Spiders, the Webspinner is bigger then the Black Widow (except for the Widow Queen, who showed up in the original Code: Veronica as a boss), which are bigger then the Jumping Maneaters.
 * They return in the aptly named Lost in Nightmares. Small, in comparison, but see Jill's Nice Hat? They're that size. Bigger.
 * Giant spiders are a common enemy in the lower levels of Rohan Online, particularly if you're a Dark Elf in Ignis, which is packed with both various species of these and the giant scorpions known as Akepions.
 * Sim Ant, the old Sim game where you lead a Colony of ants, has the giant Wolf Spider of sorts. The damn thing, once it is going after you, cannot be stopped, and a small window pops up with its beady little eyes staring right at the player. Its mandibles opening and closing, drool/venom/ant blood hanging from the tips of its fangs. There is a subversion however, in that you can choose which ant you are controlling. And apparently, you can even choose to take control of the spider...This means you can take the spider and do a suicide run on the red ant colony (The black ants mortal and sworn enemy) kill hundreds of the red ants, eventually the red ants will swarm the spider and rip it apart (Which isn't graphicly represented, Thank god) the spider merely falls over on its back. And shortly afterwards becomes four points of food. A reasonable exchange for possibly wiping out from a fourth to up to 3/4s of their numbers.
 * And if you turn the silly mode on... "Running will only prolong your suffering!"
 * But once you get a large enough group of ants, getting revenge is very sweet. And you can eat them!
 * The Ilwrath from Star Control are a race of sentient giant spiders who practice a Religion of Evil.
 * Tomb Raider 2 had an area involving these.
 * They also appear in Underworld.
 * The Big Bad of TR 3 mutates into a giant spider-human hybrid for the final battle.
 * The Warcraft universe has the Nerubians: giant, sentient, vaguely humanoid spider-creatures, as well as the more traditional giant spiders of various sizes, ranging from human-sized to size of a small house. And then there's Shadra, the lake-sized spider god.
 * They also have more generally-huge spiders, usually bigger than a human but not quite as big as a tauren. Until you enter Naxxramas. There they get to be FUCKIN' GIGANTIC. For one thing, there's Anub'Rekhan, one of the most trusted lieutenants of the king of the Nerubians, Anub'Arak (neither are actually spiders, they're more like beetles, but hey). And then there's Maexxna.
 * Another large, but not quite as big, spider, is Hadronox. Some people consider her to be scarier than Maexxna (it's the spikes).
 * There's even a giant spider mount, the Bloodfang Widow, although the merchant who sells it (the Mad Merchant) is very hard to find, and the price is an astronomical two million gold, one of the most expensive items in-game.
 * Giant spiders show up in Wizardry VII: Bane of the Cosmic Forge in the dwarven mines, and occur periodically from then on out. Their only noteworthy trait is the ability to shoot webs and paralyze the party. Oddly enough, the Silence spell stops them from doing this...
 * The PC role playing game Wizards and Warriors had scary giant spiders that would get right in your face and attack. They were rather lethal as well, given the game is played from a first person view and seeing them up close to attack is horrifiying.
 * In RPGs, the Fellowship Of The White Star event "Web of Lies" has a creepy cat lady whose pets are cat and dog sized spiders that act like cats and dogs. Hillariously creepy.
 * Ah, spiders in Thief: the Dark Project and System Shock 2. These two games were made concurrently using the same engine and were released in 1998 and 1999 respectively. Do not be fooled by the Dark Engine's graphical primitiveness; Looking Glass Studios was filled with great game designers who really loved their horror and went out of their way to put the "demonic" into their Demonic Spiders. Try to pinpoint the exact moment when the following descriptions cross the line between "that's appropriately scary" to "what the hell is wrong with you designers".
 * Both games feature spiders in the "high as your ankle" and "high as your waist" sizes.
 * Thief had small white spiders, big green spiders, and red spiders in big and small sizes. System Shock had big and small deep purple spiders.
 * All Dark Engine spiders show their presence by soft hissing. If they're moving, they make soft rhythmic foot-taps.
 * Spider walking animation is slow, intricate, and deliberate, which explains the soft foot-tapping.
 * All spiders fight melee. System Shock spiders appear to bite you, while Thief spiders seem to swipe at you with their front legs instead.
 * Thief is a stealth game, and therefore the player has poor fighting capability, especially in melee where the spiders are too small and short to hit with the sword. System Shock is a combat game, but melee against spiders not recommended because System Shock spiders are highly poisonous.
 * In addition to melee swiping, large red spiders in Thief can spit webbing at you to slow you down.
 * When searching for you, Thief spiders point their front two legs and slowly wave them left and right as if they were antennas. System Shock spiders seem limited to a strange up-and-down bob for whenever they're not moving.
 * When the spiders see or hear you, their soft hissing abruptly quintuples in volume and remains that loud thereafter.
 * Unlike walking, the Dark Engine does not render spider running movement smoothly; instead, spiders seem to sprint-lurch, and when the spiders are running at you, this lurching sometimes appear to be quasi-teleporting in long steps.
 * Large spiders are resilient. Killing them have been known to require over a dozen broadhead arrows or steel-jacket handgun bullets, and more than one explosive fire-crystal arrows, direct psionic fireball attacks, or inflammatory nanite-based assault rifle rounds. All while sprint-lurching full speed at the player in total defiance of any self-preservation instincts.
 * Large Thief spiders are able to parry your sword with their front legs. Accompanied by the actual metallic sword-parrying sound effect.
 * Certain Thief spiders have a curious behavior, where if you allow them to approach melee range, they will prevent you from getting a bead on them with your sword or arrows by jumping over your head.
 * Late game System Shock spiders tends to show up in low-light areas. Also, they are invisible. But don't worry, if you're careful to listen over ambient environmental noises, you will still hear the hissing.
 * Conversely, System Shock features a player power that turns the player invisible. A reliable panic button tactic when surrounded by enemies is to activate this Photonic Redirection power and move away from the current position, which stops the enemy from attacking and sends them searching. Spiders do not play this game. They will continue to track and attack you.
 * If by fortune you are spotted by Thief spiders and manage to run to a position where the spiders cannot reach, they will orient in your direction, rear up their front legs, freeze in place, and stare at you. Forever. If you shift your position, they turn to track you. If after working up the nerve, you come down from the table or ledge, they will drop their stance and sprint-lurch toward you. After scrambling back onto the safe spot while manically soiling yourself, they will again rear up and stare at you. Forever.
 * System Shock's spiders were so bad that a patch was created to remove the from the game so arachnophobes can play the game. Also, one Thief fan mission, called the Inverted Manse, features a large, gray, and—given the theme of the mission—presumably undead spider the size of a small shack.
 * Atlach=Nacha, an obscure H-game where you play a spider demon in high school.
 * Ghostbusters: The Video Game. "Return to the Sedgewick".
 * The most powerful creature that Nero Chaos inTsukihime has inside him is some sort of unnamed spider that is slightly larger than a large elephant. It's not pictured or named because Shiki just kills it in one blow like everything else.
 * In Overlord 2, you fight spiders the size of your minions after being shipwrecked on Everlight. Deeper into the jungle you fight their queen, who dwarfs your Overlord and minions and spits out egg clusters that hatch into smaller, minion-sized spiders. After finishing this Puzzle Boss fight, the smaller spiders do a Heel Face Turn and allow themselves to be used as mounts by your Greens.
 * The Conduit has Drudge Invaders, four-legged tank-sized creepie crawlies that launch flying bugs.
 * Dwarf Fortress has Giant Cave Spiders, dreaded by many a newbie fortress player, and the bane of all adventurer characters. They're the size of a grizzly bear, can chew through wooden doors and suchlike, feel no pain, cannot be knocked out, can trap big creatures in the web - and, of course, venomous. Oh, and after climbing was added, they can walk up the wall as fast as on the floor. It's not something "special" like a megabeast, just a common apex predator in savage caverns, but GCS can take on giant and have a good chance against roc or hydra, even despite its venom being less efficient on big creatures. On anything lesser, as DF wiki puts it -


 * Veteran fortress players, however, adore GCS and will spend entire forum threads discussing safe methods of harvesting their valuable silk. Unlike normal spiders, critters who spray web allow to collect it safely in a correct setup, and unlike bigger and meaner randomly-generated webshooters, GCS can be caught with a simple cage trap, destroy only wooden building (i.e. allow to use stone grates and doors in containment) and can be tamed, making very valuable pets (1/4 of dragon's value). Some dwarves like giant cave spiders "for their mystery", too.
 * In King's Quest III, Gwydion Alexander can get stuck in a spider web and a giant spider will eat him. Solution? Turn to a giant eagle and toss the spider to the ocean.
 * King's Quest VII has another giant spider that can catch unwary player characters in its web.
 * Bomberman 64 has Mantis, a giant ice spider, for a boss that proves to be quite a handful.
 * White Knight Chronicles has a biggie as a boss fight.
 * Alien Soldier had "Back Stringer". You fight this bugger on the previous Mini Boss, a giant moth that had recently become its dinner. Worst part was that destructible baby spiders would appear every now and then to pull down the "platform" you were on, and would cause you to fall into a Bottomless Pit if they succeeded.
 * Mega Man X had Bospider in the first game and Web Spider in the fourth.
 * The old Mac Venture game Uninvited has a giant spider underneath the house.
 * One of the bosses of Alundra 2 is a giant robot spider.
 * Earth Defense Force 2017 has giant spiders aplenty, usually paired with giant ants.
 * Giant spiders show up frequently as enemies in Dragon Age: Origins. Spiders who have been corrupted by darkspawn blood verge into Demonic Spider territory, particularly if they have the Overwhelm ability. As well, any mage with the Shapeshifter specialization can become these creatures.
 * They reappear in Dragon Age II alongside the Queen Spider, which makes the others look like midgets.
 * Evil Twin: Cyprien's Chronicles features a giant spider who is actually very friendly.
 * Most video games set in Middle-Earth naturally feature those.
 * You have to fight a few Giant Spiders in Rayman 2: The Great Escape. They're very tough opponents. Also, in the original concept of Rayman Raving Rabbids, Rayman would have been able to ride a Giant Spider. What Could Have Been...
 * Darksiders features an entire level filled with oversized arachnids. They range from the table-sized mooks (which can be annoying until you realize you can just have War stomp on them with a melee attack), the car-sized Loom Wardens (which can be easy enough once you get the Abyssal Chain), the house-sized Brood Mother (which isn't so hard once you figure out the trick to beating it), and three-story tall Spider Queen Sliltha (which is... not easy at all).
 * These are regular enemies in The Haunted Mansion video game. They're still preferable to the small spiders, which are Goddamn Bats.
 * MIMIMIMIMIMIMIMIMIMIMIMIIIII!!
 * The music that plays while she chases you is terrifying. You can out run her a spend a couple of minutes in a room, feeling fairly safe then "DUNNNN, DUN DUN DUN DUNNNNNN!"
 * Also, Tarantox from Super Mario Galaxy.
 * The Spideraticus from Wario World.
 * Touhou, naturally, goes the Cute Monster Girl route with the tsuchigumo Yamame Kurodani.
 * Donkey Kong Country 3 has Arich the Arachnid. Being the second boss (third in Donkey Kong Land 3), he shoots green orbs and hops around the boss arena.
 * There's also a friendly giant spider named Squitter, who appears in both that game and it's predecessor. He sometimes lets the kongs ride on his back and can create web projectiles that can either form platforms or attack enemies.
 * The player-monster Arachnis in Crush Crumble and Chomp
 * World of Illusion has a very comical Funny Animal Giant Spider as the first boss.
 * The Xbox Arcade game Limbo features a supremely creepy giant spider as one of the games first main obstacles. See page picture for details.
 * The freeware fighting game The Black Heart features a Stripperiffic Hot Monster Babe by the name of Ananzi who can transform into a spider and devour her opponents.
 * Minecraft has spiders that are about half as tall as the player character. Giant by real life standards, but one of the smallest monsters in the game. They deal the least damage per hit, but they can strike swiftly and repeatedly, run fast, jump, climb walls, and fit through tight crevices too small for anything else. They have a nasty habit of traveling in groups and hiding on your shelter's roof at night, waiting to pounce when you come outside in the morning. They also have a chance of dropping string, which is needed to craft fishing rods and bows.
 * There are also the rarer cave spiders, which are less than half the size of regular spiders. Still, at twenty-eight inches wide, they're unrealistically large, yet small enough to fit through a one-block gap. Unlike their larger counterparts, these ones are poisonous.
 * RuneScape has several types of large spiders, most of them which are about a size of a dog. Larger ones are also present.
 * Giant Spiders are Very dangerous in Tibia and are credited for a good number of newbies deaths, even well leveled and experienced players avoid them if they dont have the proper gear to fight or just cant run from those monsters. However, once hasted they are faster than a level fifty player and will kill the player.
 * Bugdom: A machintosh computer game has spiders in levels four and five, they may not be giant ones but they look as ugly and scary as hell, thankfully they only attack Rollie McFly (the pill bug you conrtol) by trapping him in a balled web and jumping up and down on him rather than seeing him horrifically torn to shreds and eaten, still doesn't make the spiders any less scary and ugly the way they look in the game especially since Bugdom excells in having great graphics.
 * Queen Cadavra, the fat and obnoxious black widow spider in Bug!!. At least in proportion. She's at least two times the size of Bug.
 * Several kinds of giant spiders figure prominently as enemies in Act 3 (Kurast) of Diablo 2.
 * Might And Magic VI has an entire class of monsters dedicated to this. Although they aren't very tough. They get poisonous attacks, though, and they are fast.
 * The second episode of Blood ends with an encounter with a giant spider named Shial, who is the mother of all the smaller, more annoying spiders that show up in the rest of the episode.
 * Their hissing may not be as tongue tearingly-frightening as you know who's, but these meter and a half blocky menaces from Minecraft can still ruin your day. By pushing you off a cliff.
 * The Buffy video games take the term Demonic Spiders literary, with small ones dog sized and large ones Buffy sized. They're quick, run along the walls and ceilings, knock Buffy down in one hit before jumping on top to bite (a killing move if she can't fend them off) and realistic enough to be rather unsettling.
 * Skyrim has the frostbite spiders, which can be anything from wolf-sized to almost elephant-sized. They also spit web, and tend to drop from the ceiling on top of your head if you're not careful
 * Arcanum has a vast variety of spiders. They are all poisonous and range from size of human hand to roughly three meters in heihgt to even larger... em, spidercentauresses, who wield longbows and can conjure poisonous vapors. Some species of "ordinary" spiders also can summon zombies, and other species shoot fireballs (which can be extremely annoying as those eight-legged freaks can and will destroy your equipment).
 * In Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu, the Final Boss turns into a giant spider.
 * Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning has Giant Spiders that spit webs and Venomspitters that spit, uh, venom. They occasionally burst out of the ground to ambush you because the game didn't think giant spiders alone were terrifying enough. The Webwood area is crawling with them. Even worse,
 * Master of Magic has Giant Spiders as summonable creatures (Nature Realm) - fast melee unit comparable with cavalry, with mediocre poison attack (many stronger units are immune or just too tough for it). Their strong side is casting Web (like spell, anywhere on the battlefield), which allows to down flying creatures, temporarily disable shooters or split melee rushes.

Web Comics

 * Girl Genius
 * In addition to the big "war stompers", also has real giant spiders, ridden by the Geisterdamen priestesses. This is actually one of the least creepy things about them (the Geisterdamen).
 * And of course, ghost spiders have deadly venom. According to Violetta, it causes a victim to bloat (quickly, rather than upon decomposition, that is), and at least one Smoke Knight loyal to Geister's mistress has six personal "recipes" based on this stuff.
 * They also seem to learn stunt tricks and look out for the priestesses at least to some degree, thus must be smarter than the garden variety.
 * And then there's the one in Castle Heterodyne.
 * In 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.
 * One of these turns up in Murphy's Law.
 * Vriska from Homestuck has one of these for a lusus. Imagine having this as your guardian. Now imagine being responsible for feeding it.
 * Since it's about spiders, Lycosa 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 protagonist spider. Three guesses why this page scared the crap out of some readers.
 * Squid Row: What your imagination will do to you.
 * Wasted Talent plays with this.
 * in 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.

Web Original

 * Giant Congolese Spiders infest the WikiWorld in AH Dot Com the Series, the result of Memetic Mutation about a vandalised wiki article stating that the Congo is home to four-foot-tall spiders.
 * Lots of large spiders appear in the first chapter of the Web Serial Novel Tasakeru.
 * In the KriegsMaiden 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 legspan longer than the average car!
 * Yahzee of Zero Punctuation seems to have a thing for these.
 * This. A guy finds a pretty big spider in his backyard, so he sprays insecticide all over his house and on the spider...

Western Animation

 * Jeff in The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. Partially subverted in that he's a friendly giant spider.
 * MC Pee Pants in Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a diaper wearing giant spider who gets releases a rap CD with not so Subliminal Seduction in his lyrics. Said lyrics are about eating candy so his fans can come down to his place and use their hyperactive blood-sugar levels to power a drill into hell so that he can release demons for his global diet pill pyramid scheme. Averted, because very few traits aside from the fact he's a giant spider belong to this trope.
 * In the Jonny Quest episode "Terror Island", a Mad Scientist turns several animals (including a spider) into giant monsters.
 * The long legs and giant body of "The Robot Spy", well-known from JQ's opening credits, qualify it for this trope as well.
 * The titular creature in the BBC animated series Spider was probably supposed to be an ordinary-sized house spider, but the protagonist is a very young boy and in proportion to him it looks much bigger.
 * The Transformers Animated version of Blackarachnia not only has a giant spider as an alt-mode, she.
 * Come to think of it, both Blackarachnia and Tarantulas from Beast Wars would qualify as well.
 * Her Beast Machines robot form carries even more spiderlike features, notably her concealable extra eyes. Though whether she counts as canon is open to debate.
 * On his way to ditch work, Homer of The Simpsons is confronted by a giant spider. According to his map, said spider can be bypassed by quoting a Bible verse. After a failed attempt, Homer kills it by beaning it with a rock.
 * When the family visits Africa, a giant spider destroys Homer's luggage, which he claims was bound to happen.
 * Superman fights a giant mechanical spider at the beginning of Superman vs 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 above.
 * One Courage the Cowardly Dog episode featured an entire hotel filled with giant spiders... courtesy of none other than Katz, our favorite cartoon psychopath.
 * Avatar: The Last Airbender has the giant Canyon Crawlers, which are a mix between ants, spiders, and crocodiles.
 * In Coraline, the Other Mother's true form is a sort of spider zombie doll thing with hands and legs made out of needles.
 * South Park had the Queen Spider in one episode, ruling the Vatican.
 * Subverted in that it wasn't particularly frightening or dangerous.
 * Mighty Max featured a huge spider on one episode - the only thing Norman feared. For the unfamiliar, Norman was basically Hercules, Thor and Chuck Norris rolled into one, faced any threat with "I eat X for breakfast", and nearly had a breakdown at the sight of said spider.
 * His fear is later justified when.
 * In the halloween episode of Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy, Ed, who is suffering from hallucinations, sees Johnny as a one of these. Subverted by the fact that the spider is friendly.
 * An episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes had Heloise riding one that was either half mechanical or wearing armor.
 * An episode of Static Shock briefly features one that got infected by some "Big Bang" chemicals.
 * This is shown to be Buttercup's biggest fear in the Powerpuff Girls episode "Power-Noia", she eventually overcomes this.
 * Averted in A Bugs Life where Rosie the black widow spider is portrayed as being normal-sized.
 * Scroop, the main villain of Treasure Planet resembles an evil, giant alien spider.
 * An episode of Xiaolin Showdown was about the heroes attempting to retrieve a Shen Gon Wu called the "Hidoku Mouse", which allows the user to undo any wrongdoings, from not only recurring villain Jack Spicer, but also several giant spiders living in a cave. Unfortunately, neither side ends up getting the Hidoku Mouse as it ended up falling into a large pit full of spiders and was presumably destroyed. And the spiders themselves? According to legend, the spiders despite being neither good nor evil, are actually all constantly hungry, and therefore they must eat everything (including rocks and trees) in their path in order to survive.
 * A giant spider couple is the main focus in the Adventure Time episode "Web Weirdos". When Jake and Finn get caught in a giant web, Finn tries to find a way for him and Jake to escape by offering advice on how the male spider (named Ed and voiced by Bobcat Goldthwait) can improve his relationship with his wife, Barb (voiced by Susie Essman). After making up, Barb gives birth to a thousand baby spiders.

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 over a foot (30 cm) in size, this creature's relatively harmless (to humans) venom is made up for by its increased aggression compared to most tarantulæ 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 amphibians, lizards and rodents 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 clarify, T. blondi average out at roughly 9-10" (22–25 cm). the foot+ size that everyone keeps throwing around was due to a very healthy freak of nature. Even the largest specimens in captivity rarely get that big.
 * Same difference, considering that a spider with the leg-span of a pencil is still pretty damn freaky.
 * 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.'"
 * Everybody meet the new kid in town! The recently discovered 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 of us tropers scared of lanky, skinny 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." Creepy, but highly awesome.
 * Let's not forget Maman, the giant pregnant spider which now menaces Ontario.
 * There is an extinct species of spider that grew to eight feet in length! Granted, the body was only about a foot long and it was mostly leg, but still! Freaky! Of course, these lived in a time period long before dinosaurs, when the oxygen in the atmosphere was much more concentrated, and bugs could grow to gigantic sizes. After a while, the atmosphere started shifting to what it is today, and the giant spiders - as stated above - were unable to survive at that size due to inability to breathe.
 * Scientists are still arguing about that one.

 SHE JUST WANTS TO GIVE YOU A HUG!