Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark: All References And What They Looked Like In The Books
8. The Haunted House
As mentioned earlier, the horrifying, traumatising image of the corpse woman who appeared in one of the film's most harrowing scenes, was not in fact originally associated with the big toe story.
In the story The Haunted House, a preacher stays at the titular house after reports of hauntings. In the middle of the night, he encounters the living corpse of a twenty year-old woman who was murdered. The preacher finds her remains and brings them to the local church for proper rites, and when people come to pay their respects, one man touches a finger bone and it sticks to him, forcing him to admit he was her killer. She gets her justice when he's executed, and the preacher lays her to rest properly.
While the story itself is fairly familiar in its structure and characters, it's really this image that sells the absolute terror of Gammell's work.
Her hair was torn and tangled, and the flesh was dropping off her face so he could see the bones and part of her teeth. She had no eyeballs, but there was a sort of blue light way back in her eye sockets. And she had no nose to her face.