Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark: All References And What They Looked Like In The Books
4. The Red Spot
Even with all the horrific imagery in the film, this might just be the worst, with how it taps into some very real fears in comparison to its more fantastical counterparts, and just the visceral disgust felt by the very concept.
Unlike the other film's monsters, this image in the film is less about how accurately it could portray Gammell's art and more about how it could communicate the feeling - and boy, did it achieve that, the absolute horror of spiders bursting out of a woman's face felt as much as seen (without ever becoming too gory or exploitative, fortunately).
Anyone with arachnophobia, or anyone at all, really, would have trouble looking at the way Gammell drew the story, with a gaping hole in a person's face. The film actually does show a brief glimpse of that same gaping hole, when they try to get the affected character - one of the protagonist's sisters - to the hospital, but for the most part, it is the much simpler and subtler, yet equally horrifying, image of a tiny spider leg poking out of the spot like a hair, that does the job in the film.