All 6 Shorts From Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark Ranked

Hey, Auggie, a little advice; if there’s something in the fridge and you nor anyone you live with remembers making it, go ahead and not eat it. Auggie’s story, The Big Toe, is the first we see written in real time and there’s something much creepier about watching a person hear the inevitable. Auggie takes a few bites of the stew, despite his friend’s efforts to have him not, and somehow gets a full-sized adult toe in his mouth.

He justifiably freaks out, runs to his room, and decides hiding under the bed as his best chance of survival. While Auggie’s in hideaway, we see the thin and decayed corpse of a woman turn the corner of his hallway and make her way towards his room, witnessing her nine toes as she walks. We lose track of her by the time we catch back up with the frightened teen and we, as well as Auggie, fear when and where she’ll reappear.

The director decided to go with practicality for this story, something that paid off severely as the toeless woman was as horrifying to look at as she was horrifying to not know where she was. Øvredal plays the fake-out game a few times as Auggie, and consequentially the audience, looks for the corpse. Once she’s located, her screech rivals her appearance of sheer terror as she pulls Auggie under the bed and into an abyss. In many movies the thin corpse would be the apex of horrors, but there’s one last one Øvredal brought to play.