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Arachnophobes cover your eyes because a familiar monster from the world of J.R.R. Tolkien is making a return appearance in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season two—Shelob, the giant, demonic spider who attacked Frodo and Sam as they made their way into Mordor both in the books and the Peter Jackson movies. You can check out an exclusive still of the monster above as well as a full breakdown of the new season two trailer released at SDCC here.
In Tolkien lore, Shelob is the offspring of Ungoliant, an evil spirit in the form of a giant spider who destroyed the Two Trees of Valinor, the first sources of light in Arda, the larger world in which The Rings of Power and The Lord of the Rings are set. Ungoliant disappeared far back in Middle-earth’s history, but Shelob, “an evil-thing in spider form,” to quote Tolkien, is her last surviving child. Shelob herself is also the mother of the smaller—but still huge—spiders that attacked Bilbo and the Dwarves in Mirkwood in The Hobbit. Shudder.
The Shelob we’ll see in The Rings of Power season two will be slightly different from the monster we met in Jackson’s The Return of the King. Movie Shelob’s design was based on the New Zealand tunnelweb spiders that had terrified Jackson as a child. For The Rings of Power’s version, the design team took inspiration from Tolkien’s own childhood memories of being bitten by a tarantula in South Africa, as well as a few different real-world spiders.
“The first thing we did is we all thought back to the nightmare spiders of our youth,” says senior VFX supervisor Jason Smith, who specifically referenced his own pet tarantula, Fluffy, which he got in an attempt to cure his fear of spiders as a child, as well as the black widows that infested a small space where he had to crawl to turn on the water for his cabin.
But the team also did extensive research into “every spider known to man,” Smith explains. “I realized that the fear I was feeling most aggressively was with those long, thin legs—the black widow proportions really spoke to me.”
When it came to filming Shelob, the team used a combination of blue screen and visual effects, together with a 360-degree physical set and large prop legs operated by puppeteers. “We’d come out attacking [Maxim Baldry, who plays Isildur] with this mechanical spider puppet that we had made,” Smith reveals, “with multiple puppeteers [working] the legs because we wanted to get something crawling on him. We love visual effects but only as the tool to close the gap where it must be closed.”
For Baldry himself, it was quite an experience facing Shelob. He describes himself as being “petrified” of spiders and tells us that the sequence is “a terrifying concoction of all of my worst nightmares.” Although filming on the day and working with a rugby ball with giant legs that would later become Shelob’s body thanks to the art of VFX did require some suspension of disbelief, he says the set itself was “very realistic, very claustrophobic”—especially with Berek the horse and his two wranglers in there with him.
Isildur’s tussle with Shelob was also one of a number of night shoots for Baldry over the course of the season, which did become “quite isolating” for the actor, especially since his scene partners were a horse and a part-physical, part-computer-generated giant spider—though he still loved doing it. Speaking of those long night shoots, the VFX team gave a lot of thought to the lighting of those scenes, too. Smith says they used night screens, or black screens, as well as blue screens for filming, which made it easier to get the lighting on the actor just right.
Fans of the books should keep a sharp eye on Isildur and Shelob’s fight, as there are little details within that refer back to Tolkien’s mythos. Shelob’s chief weak spot is the same in the TV series as when Sam faced her in the movie; look closely at that claustrophobic cave set for a clue to where her mother, Ungoliant, ended up.
The encounter with Shelob will, unsurprisingly, have quite an impact on Isildur as a character through the rest of season two. Having been separated from his family, who have returned to Númenor believing him to be dead, Isildur is, in Baldry’s words, “forced into a world of survival” and will be “thrown into adulthood.” Surviving Shelob (as we know he will, given what we know about Isildur’s destiny as a Ring-bearer) is “character-building for Isildur,” says Baldry. “He leaves season two a man; he is no longer a boy. He’s hardened, he’s blunt, he’s a little bit more of a mercenary… more warrior-like.”
After having to fight off that nightmare creature, we’re not surprised!
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season two premieres on Prime Video on Aug. 29.
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