"BACK TO FORMULA?!"
- Peter's mutation is depicted as pretty intense, giving him a cruel fever and showing his DNA mutating. Obviously, he's just going to get cool spider powers in the end, but knowing this all came from a mutant bug bite gives the scene a mild Body Horror vibe in the moment while it's happening.
- How about the moment where, in the beginning of realizing his spider powers that he can use, he looks down to his fingers and the movie gives a Gross-Up Close-Up of micro-hairs or some sort of spikes emerging through holes in his skin?
- The actual spider bite isn't much of a picnic, either. Most adaptations just have a simple bite sound effect (and/or Peter briefly wincing/grunting in pain), and that's the end of it. Here, Sam Raimi decides to get up close and personal, showing the spider's fangs in great detail as they penetrate Peter's delicate skin. Anyone with arachnophobia probably won't be sleeping for a while.
- Speaking of arachnophobes, there are brief flashes of a tarantula during Peter's metamorphosis. These are likely remnants of a thankfully-deleted scene (present in the novelization), where Peter has a nightmare that he's transformed into a giant spider or clips from The Beyond Sam Raimi slipped in.
- The birth of the Green Goblin. His costume is close to Narm, but when it's just Willem Dafoe grabbing Dr. Stromm and sending the poor man crashing through the window and into some equipment, then making a psychotic facial expression before letting out a primal scream, it's terrifying.Norman: Back to formula?
- Made worse by the fact that we're told later that Stromm died. We only see him get thrown into a shelf. The force could conceivably be enough kill him, but a lot worse probably happened considering Norman ends the scene by grinning in the direction he threw Stromm and leaping off camera to do God knows what.
- Norman's convulsions while being exposed to the "Goblin Formula" are nothing short of terrifying, especially with his eyes rolled back into his head. Then he just stops, completely limp, and flatlines...
- In the scene where Harry finds Norman passed out, we get a quick flashback of his transformation into the Green Goblin in the form of an extremely effective Jump Scare, showing him struggling in the transformation chamber with his eyes rolled back into his head.
- There's another, even more effective, jump scare later in the movie when an uneasy hug between Norman and Harry is interrupted by Peter dreaming about the Green Goblin coming to get him, shrieking. Peter is only just out of high school, and dealing with a sadistic supervillain like the Goblin is clearly taking its toll on him.
- It’s small and easy to miss, but there is a second Goblin in the back looming in the background of the second jump scare. There's no explanation for it, which makes it quite unsettling.
- There's another, even more effective, jump scare later in the movie when an uneasy hug between Norman and Harry is interrupted by Peter dreaming about the Green Goblin coming to get him, shrieking. Peter is only just out of high school, and dealing with a sadistic supervillain like the Goblin is clearly taking its toll on him.
- Peter himself is quite terrifying when he's hunting down the carjacker that killed Uncle Ben. He first lands on the killer's car, punches a hole right through the top of it, and grabs his face (and later breaks the car's windshield as well). But it gets even worse when Peter confronts the carjacker in the warehouse. He appears out of nowhere and brutally attacks him, smashing his head into glass multiple times as well as twisting and breaking his wrist with little effort. The sheer terror the carjacker expresses towards him just before his demise really says it all.
- More so after Spider-Man 3 reveals that Dennis Carradine here wasn't the actual shooter.
- And, of course, there's the fact that Peter is inadvertently responsible for Uncle Ben's death, or at least blames himself for it. His bitterness at the man organizing the wrestling match cheating him out of the prize money leads him to let the burglar run right past him and getting Ben killed—by the burglar himself in isolation from the sequels or accidentally by Marko after we get the full context of what happened that night, it doesn't really matter who did it, Ben is just as dead either way.
- The Green Goblin decides to interrupt a parade, whereby he terrorizes Mary Jane. Just before doing so? He vaporizes the Oscorp board of directors into skeletons which then turn into ash with a single pumpkin bomb. On-screen.Goblin: OUT, AM I?!
- Norman hallucinating that the Green Goblin is laughing and talking to his reflection in the mirror. The former page image
◊ is a good reminder of how few people can do a Slasher Smile like Willem Dafoe.Norman: Where are you?
Goblin: Follow the cold shiver running down your spine. - The depiction of Norman's Sanity Slippage in general. By the very end, there's almost nothing of the old Norman left, just the Goblin.
- The Green Goblin sets a trap for Spider-Man by setting an apartment building on fire. As Spidey is rescuing a kid, the Goblin lures him back inside by playing a soundbite of a woman screaming then throws a blanket over his back so that Spidey doesn't realize it's him until he gets up close. When he does surprise Spidey, he plays the soundbite of the screaming woman once more for surprise value.
- We see him brandishing a pair of pumpkin bombs behind his back when he's saying "Are you in or are you out?" Between that and his "You're pathetically predictable! Like a moth to the flame!" when he first reveals himself, he almost certainly used one of those pumpkin bombs to start the fire in the first place. Which is supported by the fact that the fire obviously spread very quickly by the time Spider-Man arrived.
- Speaking of the fire scene, the previous bit where the trapped baby's mother becomes increasingly anguished and stricken, watching from street level as the fire spreads and an explosion blows out the window of her apartment, is pure distilled horror in itself, no supervillainy required.
- For Aunt May, a quiet moment of prayer is interrupted by the Green Goblin crashing into her bedroom and make her finish the assurance of pardon. For Peter, the realization that not even his beloved aunt is safe from his archnemesis must have been a shock.
- He forces to her finish a part of the Lord's Prayer - the part that implies that he is the Evil that Jesus warned of!
- The next scene with Peter rushing into May's hospital room is just as bad, too. Not only is she wailing in terror, but she doesn't even realize that Peter is there.Aunt May: Those eyes! Those horrible yellow eyes!
- Peter is worried about Mary Jane and calls her house to make sure she's okay, but instead of Mary Jane, he gets the Green Goblin on the other line, who giggles and says in a creepy sing-song voice, "Can Spider-Man come out to play?"
- Green Goblin presenting Spider-Man with a Sadistic Choice: save Mary Jane or a Roosevelt Island Tram car full of passengers. It's both terrifying and sad.
- It should be noted that this scene is a reminiscent of how Gwen Stacy died at the hands of Green Goblin in the comic The Night Gwen Stacy Died, and that Green Goblin proved himself irredeemable from that moment.
- The Green Goblin's Curb-Stomp Battle on Spidey (though it turns from scary to awesome when Spidey gains a Heroic Second Wind and then completely turns the tables on the Goblin). It starts with the Goblin throwing a pumpkin bomb at Spider-Man's face that blows half his mask off and leaves him a bloody mess. What follows is arguably one of, if not the most brutal one-on-one fight scenes in superhero films until The Dark Knight Rises between Batman and Bane.
- For the part in the fight where the Goblin has the advantage, there’s no music at all. Which somehow makes it all the more frightening.
- His threat to Peter when it seems like all hope is lost, saying that if he had let Mary Jane die before her death would have been quick and painless, but now the Goblin's going to go back and "finish her nice and slow." It's made scarier because his mask's eyes have retracted and we can see Norman Osborn's actual eyes, glistening with malice. And if you look close, you can see Norman has a Slasher Smile as he says this.Goblin: You've spun your last web, Spider-Man. Had you not been so selfish, your little girlfriend's death would've been quick and painless. But now that you really pissed me off, I'm gonna finish her, nice and slow. MJ and I... we're gonna have a hell of a time!
- Norman's words could be interpreted multiple ways, all of them equally as horrifying. Though the most likely interpretation is that he was planning to torture her to death, based on a few rather creepy interactions he'd had with her prior, it's also possible that he was implying that he was going to rape her.
- What's even more horrifying is that it's likely that he was planning to do both.
- The entire wrestling match scene, right up until Peter wins, is extremely troubling. Unlike the kayfabe going on in real life wrestling, this league is a sleazy, unrehearsed Blood Sport where contestants come in off the street and immediately sign their life away with a legal waiver (and management doesn't seem to mind a teenager stepping in), the sadistic crowd is absolutely loving the violence, and Bonesaw is apparently willing and able to seriously injure his opponents with very little effort.Wrestler Preceding Peter: [being carted away on a stretcher] My legs! Oh God, I can't feel my legs...
- The Attempted Rape scene. Good God. Peter sees Mary Jane disappear around a corner past two shady-looking men, who go after her, and he immediately puts two and two together. Then she's cornered in an alleyway by two more men, one of whom making kissing gestures at her, and another barking noises. She tries to fight them off but then one guy pulls out a switchblade. God only knows what would have happened had Peter not been around that night...
- A What Could Have Been example is the original design of the Green Goblin, combining make-up and animatronics to look closer to the comic. It's also unnerving enough that reportedly Avi Arad nixed it because "We're trying to sell toys here, not scare children", and replaced it with the helmet seen in the movie.
The Video Game
- The Game Over music sounds like something from the Batman: Arkham Series.
- "Showdown With Shocker." Shocker is an effective Starter Villain, but nothing that scary... except his first phase: Trying to reach him, while hiding from his Jump Scare/Sensory Abuse blasts, in dark tunnels - a la The Fury.
- "Vulture's Lair." Gothic design and music, Suicide Attack-happy drones hiding everywhere, then he burns the place down, with you inside halfway.
- "Corralled" and "Scorpion's Rampage." The first? You Escort the poor guy, and yourself, from a swarm of similar drones. The second? He sees Spider-Man's emblem, snaps, and attacks you in perceived self-defense; sympathetic or not, a Madness Mantra-prone Juggernaut is not someone you want to provoke. And in the last scene, he just disappears; no closure, last words, or anything. Not to mention his theme, and the dark building you fight him in.
- The stealth levels in Oscorp. The first one is very dark with creepy music playing. If the guards or cameras catch you, the entire area goes into alarm mode, sending out the robotic Super Soldiers. If they find you, they will fire at you with everything they've got.Super Soldier: You're dead. You just don't know it.
- The unlockable test animation of Vulture getting into position for his heist with Shocker. It's not a very action-filled piece, with Vulture riding a subway train as he inspects a robotic spider drone he's taken from Oscorp, mumbling to himself. But the music combined with the early 2000 visuals makes it feel like a feverish mix of "encountering a sketchy person on an actual subway at night" and "meeting the Tall Man from Phantasm.
