Kari Wuhrer, who plays the sheriff of a small town overrun by giant spiders in the upcoming SF feature Eight Legged Freaks, told SCI FI Wire that firing at the computer-generated creatures wasn't as easy as it looks. "I think that was the most difficult challenge physically for me on this movie," she said in an interview while promoting the film. "You get the hang of it pretty quick when you’ve got effects guys breathing down your neck telling you this shotgun does have a kick and you have to play that. ... They gave me the real thing, and my arms were aching. I had to do the kickback all in rapid-fire time, and I was just running, and it was insane. If I wasn’t working out at the gym or something, I’d be totally dead."

As the daughter of a police officer, Wuhrer said that she grew up around guns, but nothing could have prepared her for having to wield one against giant, imaginary spiders. "We had to do a scene in the mall where all these spiders were coming after us," she said. "And I had to shoot up and down and over and get all these areas covered, because they were going to be coming from all sides. And I had to shoot the gun and cock the gun, point it in a different place. ... I was just like, 'Please, you guys, if I look like a dork, or if it doesn’t look real, let’s do it again.' So we did. Again and again and again."

In addition to being a sheriff, Wuhrer's character, Sam Parker, is also a single mother of two, an aspect that the actress found just as daunting as battling giant monsters. "I was a little nervous about playing a mom. I think that was my biggest challenge. I don’t have kids, let alone teenage kids, and I was just worried that the relationship was going to work," she said. "The courage to battle the spiders didn’t come from Sam Parker being a sheriff. It came from Sam Parker having kids and having raised them by herself and having to protect her family, which, you know, it made it a little bit easier all around once I got that relationship down."