I have found some variations in the way a spider has been used as a symbol of fear coming across seriously and comedically. Some of these examples may help make our story ideas stronger with incoporating some ideas that have come before. I particular like the Ice Spiders trailer, it has a great set up and has a similiar story type to what we wanted to do.

• Always been some sort of Monster hanging around as a sort of fear symbol into the minds of people.
• Just before 1930, Horror stories were creatures of Prehistoric origin such as the early 'Lost World'

• This later led to Kong and Godzilla as missing link symbols and symbolised as destructive gods
• The Creature from the Black Lagoon in 1954 was a beginning of a hybrid mash, in this case half man, half fish
• rubber suit

• A lot more low budget horror movies in the 50's such as It came from Beneath the Sea, a giant octopus - mutated by atomic radiation and attacks San Francisco, another example: The Abominable Snowman

• Also in the 50's were films of experiments gone wrong and one example is Tarantula (1955), a spider treated by serum and grows to a weight of 50 tonnes title creature was a result of effective matte photography
• The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) - "best effects of radiation films of all time" - Pg 34

• The Attack of the Crab Monsters - idea of creatures absorbing it's victim's minds and sending out telepathic messages to survivors and lure them to destruction

• A lot of giant atomical insect films 'The Monster that changed the World" a giant caterpillar and "The Deadly Mantis" - Praying Mantis
• Gorgo (1960) - monster with maternal instinct destroying most of the city to rescue her baby

Man-made

• Most well known is Frankenstein "Modern Promethus" created in a lab, scientist taking on a parental role over his creation
• Golem made from clay and mud, everyday becomes bigger and heavier, idea of growing in form

The Human Fiend

• Popularity of crazed doctors doing strange thing to plants, animals and humans
• Individuals forced to hide away and carry out their ambitions
• The Island of Dr Moreau
• The Fly - accidentially achieveing a horrific result

I found some more images related to robot spiders, cyborg organisms with interesting structures and designs. I specially like the sixth image as a strong influence of how menacing and exciting the creature could look. I also like the mechanisms and clockwork parts in some of the concepts to make the creature feel a bit more manufactured and could be something to consider if we end up taking the route of the creatures created by an evil scientist.

I decided to start thinking about some of the character stereotypes that could feature in the story. I used some the ideas that were mentioned in our group discussion with Alan, Dayle and Sean as well as other ideas that I thought about. We will probably discuss this further during the week but I hope this list is a good head start to begin thinking about it.

Character Suggestions

On top of actual robot spiders, I thought about Louise Bourgeois's contemporary spider sculpture and the Racnoss from Doctor Who offers a more organic approach to the robot spider.

I found some trailers from the 1930 - 1960 period to look at ideas and techniques used in the genres of Science fiction, Horror and Film Noir.




War of the Worlds 1953 trailer – similar machine against human / Sci Fi theme, use a lot of bright colours and scenes of machines falling from the sky and emerging from the meteorites. Also depicts a scene where the humans are trying to leave their invaded city but turn against each other to save themselves and escape.





Psycho 1960 trailer – Uses soundtrack to describe the atmosphere and the chill of the horror genre. In classic black and white and skips between scenes to match the intensity of what the music offers. A good selection of scenes of Bates as he explains ‘I just get mad sometimes’ and final shot of someone peering through a hole in the wall suggests the film returns to basic ideas of horror as a predator stalking it’s victim but also that there might be a deeper meaning.




Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1956 trailer – uses dramatic music and an intense voice narrator to describe the basics of an invasion of creatures from another planet and the main character running wildly and exclaiming that the human race is in danger. They don’t reveal the creatures though, which creates some of the suspense and fear to the audience.




The Invisible Man 1933 trailer – Reveals how the character wrapped in bandages helps the audience focus on what ‘ the invisible man’ has to say in dialogue scenes and therefore uses what the audience recognise as the terror because it later reveals the character to unwrap those bandages so that the audience are left with a psychotic voice that travels around the room and objects becoming inanimate by themselves. A similar technique to Psycho, using the voice or sound as the weapon of horror.




The Touch of Evil 1958 trailer – Mostly narrated using the technique of revealing big actors and the fact that it is directed by Orson Wells. It also has some action scenes thrown in to make it clear it is a thriller but the narration does a lot of the promises in hyping up the film and how the audience will react to this film.

Even though we now have a rough idea of what we want to do for our trailer I have included some of my alternative thoughts and ideas to show other ways we could of gone with it and as something to possibly fall back on.


Attack of the Robot Spiders Ideas

These were a selection of names I thought of to call our production group, Crawler was the name with the most potiential and eventually as a group we decided on StudioCrawler.

Studio Name Ideas