Peter Jackson has long been labeled by his fans as a visionary, who was able to bring the world of Tolkien’s books to life with stunning success. Despite there being some ways that the trilogy has aged badly, his adaptation of the Lord of the Rings is said by many to have ‘put New Zealand on the map’, bringing in a wealth of tourism, money, and jobs to the country.
Jackson’s combined love of his homeland, with his in-depth knowledge of the books that he had been reading since he was a teenager, created movies that pioneered new technologies, changed the face of fantasy films forever, and won 11 Oscars, still the most that any movie has ever be accredited. But beyond the love of writing, and the desire to bring the beauty of New Zealand to the screen, Peter Jackson also had another major influence in his creation of the films: spiders.
Spiders are a running theme in many of Tolkien’s stories, from Shelob and the other spiders in the War of the Ring, to the infestations of Mirkwood during the events of The Hobbit, right back to a time before elves had ever come to Middle Earth, when Ungoliant helped Morgoth extinguish the light of the trees of Valinor. There is a real evil in these scuttling creatures of Tolkien’s world, and they were also a very real fear for Peter Jackson, whose terror and fascination with the arachnids really helped him to bring the movies to life on screen.
As a boy, he used to love playing under the deck of his parents' house but was petrified of the Tunnel-web spider that dwelled in the dark cracks and crevices and would come out when least expected. This spider was a huge influence on the design of Shelob’s character, and pictures of the creature can easily be compared to her huge bulk and haired legs.
However, Jackson’s phobia didn’t stop there, in fact, he has a fear of lots of insects that creep and crawl, and this hugely shaped his vision for the Lord of the Rings. He wanted to bring that fear to life in his movies, in a way that was palpable for the audience, and would enrich the storytelling that Tolkien had intended. He, therefore, infused snippets of crawling insects and darkness into several aspects of the films, and these tiny touches added up to create the dark and ominous journey of the hobbits to Mordor, to destroy the one ring in the fires of Mount Doom where it was forged. From the early scenes where the four hobbits hide beneath the tree from the ring-wraith that pursues them, and all of the insects ooze out of the earth at his touch, to the scuttling goblins in the Mines of Moria who skitter and mass in the dark like a swarm of crazed ants, or a wolf-spider next with millions of tiny arachnids contained within.
These elements incorporated some of the ways that Tolkien used early horror tropes in his stories, and they gave Weta a great understanding of the look and feel that Peter Jackson wanted them to design. In fact, Weta Workshop, and Weta digital both gleaned their names from this very same phobia of Peter Jacksons’, of insects. Wetas themselves are like a giant cricket, native to New Zealand, and they live in the underbrush in some of the country’s oldest forests. So when the crew was re-creating Fangorn Forest, where the trees talk, and the ents dwell, they collected huge amounts of real leaves, bracken and branches to create a sense of authenticity.
Unfortunately, there was a live Weta collected with it, and when the creature crawled up Peter Jackson's leg before the day's filming had begun, he fled across the parking lot. The actors weren’t aware of what had happened, or why he ran, and the crew didn’t inform them because it created a sense of eerie mystery about the set, which influenced the acting to be far more real and believable. That’s why when Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli walk into Fangorn seeking Merry and Pippin who have been mistaken for ‘little orcs’, they all seem genuinely spooked.
Everything that Peter Jackson and Weta did in the creation of the films was about making a world, a culture, a language, and a history that all felt real, and this probably wouldn’t have been half as successful if they hadn’t poured their own real thoughts and feelings into it as well. With the recent announcement that Warner Brothers are delving into Tolkien’s world, fans are waiting to see if the new movies could cover things that Peter Jackson’s versions missed. But whether they cover new source material or old, many doubt that they will ever be able to live up to the wonderful and authentic world that Jackson created.