"Get them off me! Get them off me! Get them off me! Get them off me!"
The illustrations for the source material were scary as is, but the true horror of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark gets taken to a whole new level on film.
As a Nightmare Fuel subpage, all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
- Harold. His grotesque face always has roaches crawling around it. Then it just gets worse when he comes to life and stalks Tommy.
- To elaborate, Tommy and his friends are implied to have been abusing Harold for several years, especially when they get drunk. When Tommy forgets to deliver some eggs to some neighbors, he takes a shortcut through the cornfield, not missing the chance to curse out Harold on the way. However, it becomes clear that the cornfield's layout is changing as he keeps coming back to Harold no matter what he does. Eventually, Harold disappears from his post and begins to slowly chase after Tommy. Tommy attempts to fight back by stabbing Harold with a pitchfork, but Harold takes it like a champ, yanks the pitchfork out of Tommy's hands, and stabs him with it. Tommy then stumbles out of the cornfield as straw begins endlessly emerging from his jacket sleeves, mouth, ears, and even his pitchfork stab wounds (the disorienting close-ups and squelching sound effects certainly don't help). The next day, Stella and Ramon find a scarecrow wearing Harold's mask and Tommy's clothes...
- The Pale Lady from "The Dream" looks exactly like how she did in the book illustration, complete with the same beady eyes and wide mouth. If you were traumatized by the image like many children were, have fun seeing her moving in live-action! Her scene is considered by many to be the most unsettling sequence in the film.
- To elaborate more, Chuck first sees her walking towards him and freaks out. He turns to face another hallway so he can escape... only to see another version of the Pale Lady walking towards him. This happens with every single hallway in the area, until finally Chuck is trapped with four copies of the Pale Lady slowly closing in on him from every direction. They trap him between themselves and one of them embraces Chuck, who is then slowly absorbed into her body. Chuck doesn't even scream as he's absorbed; it's actually worse. His eyes glaze over and he lets out these few choking gasps, as if her embrace is crushing the air out of him as she shoves him inside her or he's gone into shock. Either way, it's terrifying.
- One of the most disturbing things of the scene is how utterly helpless Chuck seems. As soon as the Pale Lady shows up, nothing he does even slows her down as she's at the end of every hallway. At least Harold and the Jangly Man could be run from. With the Pale Lady, it's as if nothing Chuck does even matters.
- The whole scene legitimately feels like something straight out of a nightmare. From the unearthly atmosphere, to the strange design and behavior of the Pale Lady herself, to the way reality itself seems to warp around Chuck so he has no chance of escape, and his gruesome yet ambiguous final fate. The worst part is that unlike the other monsters who have a clear motive (Big Toe wants her missing appendage, Harold seeks revenge, the Jangly Man is dead set on punishing Ramon for his supposed cowardice, and the spiders are just instinct driven animals), there’s absolutely no telling what the Pale Lady wants.
- There is a quick shot in the trailer of the Jangly Man slowly crab-walking toward one of the characters with his head upside-down relative to the rest of his body, all with an unmoving Cheshire Cat Grin plastered on his face.
- The build up to his appearance is nerve-wracking. Chief Turner starts reading the story, the lights are out, and the dog suddenly seems eerily fixated on the fireplace. The dog makes quiet stilted grunting noises, as if it's barking really softly; then it gets slightly louder and clearer, and almost sounds like he's speaking the title of the story repeatedly. Ramon hears this and immediately starts panicking cuz he's familiar with the story from his own childhood, and realizes it's about to become real. Much like how the Big Toe woman took forever to finally attack Auggie, the Jangly Man takes a while to finally appear, as we get many slow cuts of the Chief warily inching closer to his strangely-behaving dog, the dog's grunts getting slightly louder, ramon and Stella's panicking, and finally the jangly Man's head rolls out of the fireplace onto the floor, sits still for a moment, before opening his eyes, and shouting the title of the story.
- The Jangly Man from the story "What Do You Come For?" in general is very disturbing. It's quickly established that he has Nigh-Invulnerability, as Chief Turner unloads his entire gun clip into the Jangly Man's head and it does nothing. He can also detach and reattach his body parts with ease, making trapping him next to impossible (as shown when he escapes from the jail cell and from being pinned between two cars by disassembling himself). He's a Super-Persistent Predator, who is hellbent on killing Ramon (his designated victim) and relentlessly hunts him. He's very fast and strong, with sharp senses that help him track down his prey. That's not even going into the Body Horror of his appearance. It's pretty telling that the Jangly Man was not defeated through conventional means; he only stopped being a threat when Sarah Bellows herself recalled him.
- And of those jerky twisted movements the Jangly Man does? That's not CGI, that's really the actor/contortionist Troy James.
- After being rammed by a police car, the Jangly Man becomes trapped between the car and a truck. It falls to pieces and its individual parts drop out of view. There's a shot of the empty street next to the crash and then the Jangly Man jumps up in the middle of the shot and begins hunting Ramone again.
- The Jangly Man also snaps a man's neck on camera.
- When he’s attacking Stella and Ramon in the the prison, he climbs up the bars and and squeezes through the gap. What’s even more unsettling is that besides the costume there’s no special effects involved: Troy James can actually do that.
- The bending and twisting he does is accompanied by the sounds of his limbs snapping and his pained groans. You can tell it’s exactly as painful to him as you could imagine, but he pushes on anyway because he’s determined to kill Ramon and absolutely will not stop for anything.
- The Big Toe woman revealing her hideous face to Auggie before taking him. The fact that her design was based off of the corpse woman illustration in "The Haunted House", probably the most infamous and traumatizing of all the illustrations in the series, doesn't help.
- The build up is horrifying too. Auggie originally assumes that Stella and Ramon are pranking him, until he realizes that the stew he’s eating actually contains a human toe, which he promptly vomits up. He knocks the stew over in panic, spilling it all over the floor and revealing her eyes are also in it, and he was seconds away from eating those too. Then he hears the ghost limping through the house asking for her toe back and is reduced to hiding under his bed like a scared child. The door opens but no one seems to enter, and he waits in terror, until he finally decides to crawl out and take a look. Just when it all seems safe she’s right there, ready to drag him off into the darkness.
- The Red Spot is brought to life in truly horrific fashion, hitting on multiple common fears — Peer Judgment, Body Horror, SPIDERS, and did we mention more spiders. It starts with Ruth dealing with an ugly pimple the night of her performance, clearly in pain and humiliated by the other girls' reactions. This alone is a common fear for many a teenager, and simply escalates once the Spot begins swelling and moving. Eventually, a tiny leg pops out and then an unimaginable number of tiny spiders start crawling out of the spot and begin attacking Ruth, who's previously been seen being scared by the very thought of a spider getting on her. The poor girl lives, but is sent to the hospital for multiple spider bites and is possibly mentally scarred for life.
- There's one disturbing scene that doesn't involve any monsters. Stella is in her room when she notices that the book of scary stories now has a story she hasn't seen before. She touched her thumb to the title of the story and it creates a red stain on the page. There's then a shot of her thumb showing it smeared with blood.
- One of the most haunting scenes in the entire movie is something completely original to the film and doesn't need any horrifying imagery to accompany it. When Stella and Ramone investigate Sarah Bellow, they find a wax cylinder containing a recording of her electroshock therapy. Stella and Ramone hear Sarah being violently tortured by her own brother, Ephraim, to "confess" to poisoning the dead kids she's associated with—which Ephraim and the rest of her family know is entirely their own fault—while Ephraim remains chillingly apathetic to his own sister's pleas for him to stop. In a movie full of monsters and creepy horrors, this is a much more grounded, human instance of Nightmare Fuel and the first to truly sell the magnitude of Sarah's Freudian Excuse.
- And since the scene wasn't unsettling enough, it also gets a supernatural twists when Sarah starts narrating Chuck's story as it appears on the book. The scariest part? She is not overriding the audio. We can hear Ephraim's react to the narration and be confused by who Chuck should be, meaning she was actually narrating the story back then. It's better not to dwell on the implications.
