Editorials
[Editorial] My Ongoing Fear of Video Game Spiders
Hello. I’m Daryl Baxter, and I’ve had a fear of spiders in video games since I was six years old.
There’s many out there who have a phobia, whether it’s snakes, cockroaches, or even a type of sponge if you look hard enough on YouTube. Fear and phobias can be found in many forms. For me, it’s in the medium of video-games, and the animation of arachnids, where it spurs paranoia, discomfort, and panic in any game I play that they feature in.
Since I was asked to write this, I’ve been trying to think of the point in time of where it all began.
I then realized it wasn’t exactly a spider that started it. It was a Facehugger in Alien Trilogy for the PlayStation. We were lucky back then, where small CRT TV Screens were the norm for most of us. We only had to experience that Facehugger crawling up, and covering the screen in fuzzy-vision. Still, the stuff of nightmares seeing this.
This was only the first level. But for a game whose atmosphere is dark, dim, and quiet, seeing something small crawl across in the distance, disappearing from view, then suddenly seeing it cover your whole field of vision, it was a nasty surprise for my six-year-old self. If that wasn’t bad enough, there was also a level towards the end where it was the Queen’s lair, and many, many eggs, ready to hatch.
After that, there are two other games that sealed it.
Tomb Raider II was a great game in 1997 and still is. But there’s a section towards the end of the game, at the Temple of Xian level, where you would face a cave. This cave would feature huge white spiders, alongside some crawling out of cocoons, and as an added treat, the section would be pitch black. Alongside composer Nathan McCree’s sudden stabs of music, just to add to the terror, you’d only see these creepy-crawlies as the lights of 1996 shaders would flicker and flash as you’d fire the twin pistols, or as you lit up a flare. Delightful. I had other people complete that section for me so I could finish the game.
This fear then blossomed with Resident Evil, the second entry particularly.
I would look for the cursed word of ‘spider’ in magazine guides before I’d play the game itself. Then once I’d spotted it, I’d try to forget what I’d previously read so I wouldn’t spoil myself with what else was to come in the game.
I’d then try to prepare myself as I was close to the fabled sewers section. As soon as I reached them with Leon, I closed my eyes and just, ran. I could hear the thudding steps of those eight legs throughout, and randomly holding down the R1 + Square to fire off the shotgun.
It really didn’t help that if one was killed, smaller spiders would then appear, with the sound ongoing. What also was a treat were the fabled camera angles of what was a staple of the first generation of the games. They were always at a fixed angle, so if one crawled into a particular place, you’d have a full view of one covering the screen, harking back to the nightmares of Alien Trilogy.
This would repeat in my favorite of the Resident Evil games, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, where you would come across giant spiders in a clock tower during the second half of the game. Even though I’d later replay this on a PSP, a much smaller screen, I’d still be incredibly uncomfortable at the site (and sound) of those jittering legs.
The Resident Evil series is a great time, and the games fulfill their job of being ‘Survival Horror’. It’s not necessarily the jump-scares that people are scared by, it can be just the look of the enemies themselves and how they move, and that’s how it’s been for me for the last twenty years with its depiction of arachnids.
But there have been other times where eight-legged freaks creeped me out. Even on a 2D side-scroller such as Spider-Man on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, there was a hidden side-boss of a spider-slayer; a robotic large spider which you’d have to destroy with blue and yellow bombs. You may be thinking that as this was a cartoony, 2D Platformer, surely it wouldn’t be that much of an issue, but unfortunately, it was!
Again, it harkens back to the movements. This made it so creepy to me, I made sure not to approach the floor where it presided as much as possible after that.
It sounds somewhat tragic reading it back, and perhaps it appears so to you as well reader, but I think it’s unique. Unique in the fact that a medium such as video-games can bring this feeling to me, and how the efforts to mimic a real-life arachnid, more by its animations than its look, is telling, even for the original PlayStation generation.
With the remake of Resident Evil 2, all I’m currently thinking about is how those sewer-dwelling spiders will look on a 4K television, while forgetting all the other incredible moments such as the start of the game, the police station, and fighting Birkin.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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