Name: The Horror Short Film In Spider-Man 2
Uploaded: 2026-01-29T17:16:32.000Z
Duration: 6 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Like a lot of people, I got a jolt of nostalgia from seeing Alfred Molina as Doc Ock in the no Way Home teaser.

Part of me resents the way Marvel so easily pushes my buttons with its weaponized intertextuality.

And I'm glad for that, because the teenage me convinced me, the 30 something me, to rewatch Sam Raimi's Spider Man 2.

It's a straight up horror scene that Raimi snuck into a superhero movie.

Of course, that's not surprising for Raimi, whose cinematic roots are in the horror genre with his cult classic Evil Dead movies.

being a big budget PG13 studio movie, Raimi couldn't utilize all the gory details from his early earlier projects.

So how do you make a bloodless scene genuinely scary?

This really is a whole semester of film school in just two and a half minutes.

You learn so much just going through this scene frame by frame.

For example, the first shot, which establishes the space where the scene will take place, is incredibly dynamic in the way it tracks backward and cranes up with tools and people moving into frame, arriving at a composition that centers the scene's main characters, Doc Ock's mechanical arms.

Then you have this extreme close up of an eyeball directly above the blades of a circular saw, which is just uncomfortable to look at.

There's a moment of silence that builds the tension, and

then the saw restarts with a whine that rises in pitch, building it further.

But reflected on his colleague's glasses, a mechanical arm looms behind him.

The surgeon whips around the arm, lunges, and

then we cut to the arm's pov, which goes right into that eyeball from before.

This scene is all about establishing the autonomous mind of the arms, which will control Dr.

So Raimi gives them a perspective of their own.

Now, let's take a look at those shots in real time.

Okay, that's an awesome sequence of seven shots.

And they work so well because they function as one continuous movement from the whip turn of the surgeon's head to the snap zoom at the doctor screaming.

And it's the same with the sound effects.

Not only do they make the visuals more legible, but

the isolated flipping sound before and the scream after make the glass shattering more impactful too.

And look how Raimi puts a Fan on the doctor's hair to make the screen eat more blood.

We should feel the terror of being completely at the mercy of these vicious arms.

But we should also be able to easily read that mayhem on screen.

A lot of what Raimi does to intensify the violence here also clarifies it.

For example, after this shot, the lighting in the operating room becomes very dramatic, motivated by the arms knocking all the lights around.

But this also helps to spotlight what Raimi wants us to see.

This is especially helpful because there are multiple things happening in many of these shots.

Like this one, where one arm grabs this doctor by the leg, then pushes this doctor into the cart loaded with a squib to again intensify and clarify this impact.

Or this next shot where first the man's shadow cuts across the frame, then his body, then the light crashes from above.

The arms move like hunting snakes, grabbing people by the head and tossing them like ragdolls.

This scene was actually shot a few months before the rest of principal photography.

when Raimi and the team saw how real the puppeteers could make the arms look, they decided to shoot the scene there and then.

I'm sure some of these arms were replaced by cgi, but they're mostly in camera, and

Speaking of physicality, is any blood and gore scarier than this?

And all it took was some fake fingernails and a wax floor.

Raimi pulls out all the tricks, filming this space from every angle, putting the stunt people through their paces.

And he makes the genius decision not to score the scene with music.

Instead, he leans on the push and pull of sound effects and screams.

Impressionistically composed, it's a symphony all its own.

Yes, this is stylized, but it's also disturbing.

After all, these people are being murdered in very unpleasant ways.

The kids who saw this in theaters, either they were traumatized or they became instant horror fans.

The rest of Spider Man 2 is great, but this scene is a special treat.

We get to watch a number of artists, led by Sam Raimi, apply their experience and flex their muscles in a two and a half minute, bloodless bloodbath.

We're all nostalgic for a lot of things from our youth that probably don't deserve it.

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