The Watcher in the Woods is one of the Darker and Edgier tales of Disney. It plays as a suspenseful mystery horror with surreal, unexplainable elements, and it contrasts with the usual light-hearted iconography of the company.
- When Jan looks out her window at the forest for the first time, it suddenly cracks in the form of a triangle. After being confronted with this, she has a suspicious feeling something is wrong.
- After Jan accidentally drops something while placing her mirror down, she looks at it and finds that her reflection is gone. After a little bit, it cracks again with the image of a blindfolded girl appearing within the section of the crack giving a ghostly wail that subtly sounds like help me. It then completely cracks and falls off.
- How the Watcher spies on Jan's family, viewing it from the camera's perspective, gives off the same frightening sensation of being watched by something otherworldly.
- Ellie as if in a trance, slowly writes down the name Karen backwards. She then snaps out of it and claims that Jan whispered the name. When Jan states how this couldn't be the case, Jan then says someone else must've said it. A lack of clarification makes the situation creepy despite nothing overtly scary going on.
- Ellie is playing with her new dog, Nerak when a mysterious man appears behind a tree. Jan suddenly is unable to see her and immediately panics to look for her. Even without the supernatural elements, it immediately calls to the fears of children kidnapping by strangers when you take your eyes off them for a moment.
- After an ethereal voice sings, a ray of light suddenly hits the swamp, which Jan immediately takes note of. She investigates it to see a glowing circle where the beam landed before it vanishes. Jan herself suddenly vanishes and reappears in a flash of light. The disorientation nearly causes her to drown. Mrs. Aylwood appears out of nowhere and pushes her in with her stick, and the camera shows Jan about to pass out. Thankfully, it was to save her, but the situation showed how there was something very unnatural that was happening in the woods.
- When Mrs. Alywood recounts her past, she frantically goes to search for her daughter, Karen who seemingly died during the eclipse several years ago during a fire at the abandoned chapel. From a parent's perspective, your child vanishes off and you search for them only for them to seemingly die.
- While Jan is in the funhouse mirror room, her reflections suddenly turn into that of the blindfolded ghost with several copies of her asking for help in a distorted, ghostly voice.
- When the horses are startled, Jan ends up at the burnt chapel and stumbles upon a coffin with the blindfolded ghost's head exposed. She reopens her eyes only to see it empty again [as a crow comes out suddenly.
- When Jan visits the church, she encounters Tom threateningly approaching her, thankfully he turns out to be a friendly if not odd man.
- Tom's flashback of the initiation ritual's camera angles are off-titled in a disorienting manner.
- Jan spots her sister, Ellie writing Do it tomorrow on a window in a trance-like state, and when she says certain lines, it cuts back to Ellie repeating the same lines, which alarms Jan, hinting at something possessing Ellie.
- When Ellie tries to find Narek, her concerned tone suddenly becomes uncharacteristically low-key and emotionless as she walks slowly to the church as she or rather, the Watcher explains how Karen and it swapped places, the voice becomes increasingly unrecognizable to Ellie's own voice.
- The movie's intended interpretation of the Watcher's true form- a dark creature that looks like a cross between a multi-winged insect, alien, and demon. Whenever it's not moving in slowly approaching movement, it is suddenly twisting sharply in stop-motion. It proceeds to zap Mike away with its yellow eyes suddenly turning red before it wraps its wing-like arms around her and then vanishes.
- Everyone present is understandably horrified at the sight, making it in-universe horror.
