All Webbed Up

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
This wasn't the worst thing to happen to her today either.

A sign that a cave contains deadly spiders, this is a human shaped web, typically hanging from the ceiling in the way that a spider might wrap a fly in web before drinking its fluids. Common in computer games. Counts as Fetish Fuel for some people. Also see Bound and Gagged.

Examples of All Webbed Up include:

Art

  • Go to Deviant ART and enter "webbed" or "cocooned" in their search box. You will find tons of examples there.

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

  • Spider-Man does this to anyone he needs really tied down, seeing as he "spins a web, any size; catches crooks, just like flies."
  • Played for horror in Thorgal
  • A minor villain in Batman did this to two of his henchmen when they screwed up—the cocoons were airtight, and the victims suffocated.
  • Happens to Choronzon in The Sandman.
  • Preservers in Elf Quest like to wrap living beings in suspended animation cocoons. The cocoons don't give a clue as to their occupants' shape, though in the case of humans or elves the size is usually a giveaway.
  • Samhain on this Hack Slash: The Series cover.
  • Widow from Savage Dragon can spin webs to tangle people up. It was unknown how she achieved this for many issues until a single panel cropped up showing her hanging upside down from a web-strand... only both of her hands were free and her leg was obscuring the direct source of the web. One reader jokingly wrote in and asked if she spun webs the same way spiders do and Word of God responded: yes.

Fan Works

  • Not played for laughs in Shadowchasers: Sweet Sixteen. The protagonists are kidnapped this way courtesy of drow elves with Giant Spider pets, and a rather frightening description of Becky's point of view follows, focusing on not being able to move or talk, and the helplessness associated with both. Even worse, she knows enough about actual spiders to know just how they deal with prey after securing them...

Film

  • Stephen King's The Mist has several people cocooned by monstrous spider-like things from the mist. Since they're able to cocoon people despite their webs being caustic enough to cut off people's limbs in other scenes, they presumably can spin different types of webbing. (As do ordinary spiders.)
  • Some of IT's victims are webbed up for later eating after their brains are broken by the Deadlights.
  • Scarlett Johansson gets cocooned by a Giant Spider in Eight Legged Freaks, as do several other people.
  • In Infestation, everyone in the area passes out after a bright flash and strange noise. Upon waking, the main character finds himself, and everyone else in sight, wrapped up by the invading creatures.
  • Happens in a deleted scene of the original Alien. It also happens briefly to Newt in Aliens, and to several other victims throughout the franchise. The xenomorphs use some kind of unexplained organic resin to cocoon people, leaving them as bait for facehugger eggs. There was originally supposed to be a xenomorph specifically bred for cocooning in Aliens, but it never made it past the concept art stage.
  • The cover (and just the cover) of Night Screams.
  • In James and the Giant Peach, Miss Spider and the Old Green Grasshopper team up to give Aunts Spiker and Sponge this treatment.
  • Rosie actually does to PT Flea near the end of A Bug's Life after realizing that he was not nice to the circus bugs.

Literature

Live-Action TV

  • Star Trek: Enterprise had some alien organism effectively web up Captain Archer and four other crew members.
  • Subverted in Star Trek: Voyager; the forehead-of-the-week's corpses just happen to decompose that way.
  • This appears in the Angel episode "Couplet", Fred and Gunn are in the flesh-eating tree's roots.
  • Doctor Who episode "The Runaway Bride" has this.
  • Ghostwriter, in a fiction writing contest (a story-in-a-story), had one of the characters slimed and attached to a door.
  • The victims of the Arachne in the Supernatural episode "Unforgiven".
  • Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue had this happen to four of the rangers and the entire Aquabase personnel. They were stuck to a giant web while spider eggs were slowly hatching to eat them alive.
  • The X-Files had this in the episode 'Darkness Falls'. It's different in that the subjects are killed before being cocooned(as seen by the badly-eaten corpses of loggers earlier in the episode). It's possible that the bugs were just storing food, or leaving it for their babies.
  • Subverted in The River. The father, whom everyone has been searching for, is eventually found like this (though encased in amber), but it turns out he did this to himself in order to survive.

Tabletop Games

  • Basic Dungeons & Dragons module M5 Talons of Night. Finnister MacAlister and any other captive NPCs are found paralyzed and wrapped up in web with egg sacs bound to their chests - they're intended to be food for the baby spiders.
    • You can also cast the Web spell yourself!
  • Call of Cthulhu. Very likely to happen to anyone who tangles with the giant spider-like Great Old One named Atlach-Nacha or Leng Spiders.

Toys

  • In Bionicle, the Toa Metru get webbed up by the Visorak and subsequently mutated into Beast Men.

Video Games

  • Dark Messiah
  • Thief
  • Temporarily happens to your character in Limbo. You have to make an escape while still covered in webbing, greatly reducing your mobility. It's a bit of a comic relief moment, actually, unless you trip into a pit of spikes...
  • Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver has this in the Silenced Cathedral, which is inhabited by spider-like degenerate vampires. Many of them are still moving.
  • StarCraft II: the mission Outbreak, you come across human shaped cocoons labeled "Infested Refugee".
  • When you first discover the Arachne in Devil May Cry 3, numerous human-shaped cocoons can be seen hanging upside-down from the ceiling and from webs.
  • One of the bosses in Muramasa: The Demon Blade does this to Torahime.
  • Guild Wars: In "The Wilds" mission, several webbed prisoners must be saved towards the end.
  • Blood has this, in the final level of Episode II, where the big boss is a giant spider.
  • Neverwinter Nights likes to leave human-sized web cocoons around wherever there are giant spiders.
  • Any area in Dragon Age that includes Giant Spider enemies is bound to have quite a few of these to loot.
  • World of Warcraft has a few boss encounters where either the mooks or the bosses can cast a web wrap. Notably Maexxna, the final boss of Naxxramas' Arachnid Quarter, will cast web wrap against the entire raid a number of times during the encounter. Web-wrapped NPCs occur in several arachnid-populated areas as well.
    • Warcraft III also had Nerubians being able to use Web attacks. Undead Crypt Fiends in particular could use webs to allow ground units to attack air units.
  • City of Villains: Web-wrapped human figures are among the Videogame Set Pieces to be found hanging from the walls of Arachnos bases.
  • One such corpse hangs in Vagary's lair in Doom 3. It actually twitches like crazy when you're still seeing the lair through a window, but by the time you get inside, the person's dead.
    • Actually, webbed up corpses start appearing a ways earlier, Foreshadowing the appearance of the Trites, the game's literal Demonic Spiders (not gameplay-wise, though), and usually come up in areas where you fight them. There is at least a dozen of them in the previously mentioned Vagary room.
  • Level three Spider Lair upgrade in the Battle For Middle Earth II LOTR RTS.
  • Warhammer Online has several quests to go into a town overrun with "Silkens", giant mutant spiders that wrap victims in cocoons. One of them is to burn the cocoons of marauders who have proven too weak to the cause by being cocooned as food/gestation units and need to be destroyed to ensure the weakness is purged. Another is to gather the blood of a prominent villager and anoint a banner with it - the villager happens to have already been cocooned, so you need only stab him and gather the blood from the twitching, prone cocoon.
  • Brutal Legend has this before the battle with the Heavy Metal Queen, a giant spider made of motorcycle parts. Some of the cocoons are twitching, but not because the victim is still alive—when you get near they burst and reveal dozens of tiny spiderlings.
  • Pathways into Darkness states that if you are successfully killed by giant spiders, they web up your body and drag you away to be eaten.
  • The Pokémon moves "String Shot," which lowers the opponent's speed, "Spider Web," which completely prevents the target from escaping, and "Electroweb," which deals electric damage and lowers the target's speed. Both families of spider Pokémon can learn all of these, and it's pretty obvious how they all work.
    • Far more powerful and brutal is "Savage Spin Out", the Z-Move done with Bugium Z. The Pokemon cocoons it opponent and then body-slams the cocoon twice using an attached strand.
  • Resident Evil Code: Veronica - Happens to Claire Redfield. And there's a webbed-up corpse in the moth corridor.
    • Resident Evil Outbreak - Characters that get grabbed by the moth in "Below Freezing Point" will be found webbed to a wall several floors below.
  • In Adult Swim Games' Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars, this is you primary means of recapturing your rebellious slaves.
  • In Ghostbusters the Video Game we have the Spider Witch's level which is just one big level dedicated to our webby friends. There are bodies hung from the ceiling and the whole level is basically wrapped in webs. An arachnophobe's worst nightmare for sure.
  • A handful of minions meet this fate in Overlord II after your ship is wrecked on a spider infested tropical island. You can rescue them, though.
  • In Diablo III, you rescue Karyna, the Dummied Out mystic Artisan, from the enormous web she's caught in moments before the Spider Queen arrives to suck her guts out.

Web Comics

  • Parodied in Girl Genius, as shown in this page's image: The spider even uses a knife and fork, and webs up its victim while the main characters are arguing over who has to squash it.
  • The victims of Vriska's Giant Spider lusus are briefly seen stuck in a web. Many of them were probably already dead when they got there, since Vriska kills people in a variety of ways other than luring them to her hive.
  • Dreamwalk Journal spinoffs The Widow and Nightshade, the Merry Widow feature partially-wrapped anthro-arthropod victims, waiting not to be eaten but screwed senseless.

Web Original

Western Animation

  • The Disney Aladdin episode "Web of Fear" had the Unkhbut wrap up Princess Jasmine and take her underground.
  • Very briefly occurs in an episode of Totally Spies!, via a giant robot spider.
  • Happens at least twice on Martin Mystery.
  • Because actual violence was a no-no, the The Legend of Zelda cartoon had Tektites project red silk to entangle their victims. (In the games, Tektites just hop around for Collision Damage.)
  • On the American Dad! episode "Brains, Brains, and Automobiles," during the sequence of Stan trying to find Francine in Roger's brain after Francine gets mad at Stan for purposely poisoning Roger as a means to stall their "alone time", Stan walks into a cave and finds Roger's conscience (a small, weak Jiminy Cricket-esque bug who's dying of neglect) begging Stan to kill him. He then finds actor Tom Skerritt stuck to the wall in a white web-looking cocoon. Tom begs Stan to, "Get me work!"
  • Spider-man in The Spectacular Spider-Man, just like his comic book counterpart. Probably most notably was when he did this repeatedly to Kraven to make sure he couldn't break free this time.
  • Blackarachnia from Transformers Animated actually does this to her enemies, like Bumblebee and Prowl.
  • Papa Smurf in The Smurfs episode "The Magnifying Mixture" got spun into a cocoon when he accidentally spilled the enlarging formula onto a small spider.