Aunt Spiker

"How dare you speak to us this way!"

- Aunt Spiker to James "How dare you disagree with us!"

- Aunt Sponge to James

Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge are the main antagonists of James and the Giant Peach. They are James' aunts.

After the death of James' parents, they had no choice but to take in James. Instead of caring for him, they force him to do all the work, they beat him, and almost always make him go into his room without dinner.

About Spiker
Aunt Spiker is a strikingly tall, skinny, and cold (on the inside) woman. She's probably the older aunt. Spiker also seems to be the smarter one of the two.

About Sponge
Aunt Sponge is a short, fat and ugly woman. She's usually the one who beats up James and eats the most. She claims that she is a very beautiful woman like her older sister Spiker, but looks beg to differ. She is also not as smart as Spiker.

History
Spiker and Sponge are the older sisters of James' late father. They live in a poor, rundown house on top of a rocky hill and both of them wanted to be rich. So after descovering the giant peach, they both decided use the it to get rich instead of eating it. During all this, the two Aunts try to scare James about the mysterious Rhino that killed his parents. But when the peach got loose, they follow it all the way to New York (which is across the Atlantic Ocean). Later on, James has a dream in which he imagines he is a caterpillar eatinga peach from a garden, which later turns out to be the garden of his aunts, who manifest in his nightmare.

When James tells the cop what they do to him, they attempted to either harm or murder James.

In the end, they are both tied up in Miss Spider's string with Mr. Grasshopper spinning them around, and the cop has them taken away on a crane.

After the credits, there's a scene showing an arcade-like game which consists on controling a rhinoceros to attack models of the aunts.

Book
In the book, when the Peach gets loose and rolls, it flattens Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge, killing them both, and they subsequently do not reappear at the end.

Trivia

 * When James and Miss Spider were searching for both Mr. Centipede and a compass, one of the sunken ships had both Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge on the mast.
 * Aunt Spiker is played by Joanna Lumley
 * Aunt Sponge is played by Miriam Margolyes