“The Walking Dead” went a little bit Wes Craven, a little bit Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

Easily the standout sequence of last night’s Season 9 premiere of “The Walking Dead” took our group of heroes to DC, where they scavenged for supplies at an abandoned art museum. It’s always great to see the characters in brand new locations and the museum proved to be a fresh, suspenseful and downright frightening new setting for the series.

Down in the basement, well, the group was attacked by the show’s most genuinely nightmarish ghoul to date. As it turns out, “Spider Zombie” was a nod to Deadly Blessing!

Speaking with Screen Rant, episode director Greg Nicotero detailed his latest “zombie tribute,” which came in the form of a gnarly zombie literally *covered* in eight legged freaks.

He explained, “When we were designing the shot, originally it was like, ‘Okay, a bunch of spiders come out of the eye.’ And I was like, ‘No, they’ve got to come out of the nose, come out of the mouth, and then you’ve got to have, like, the mama spider come out.’ So not only is it the little ones, but then out of the mouth – which is very Wes Craven… my Deadly Blessing homage, the part where the spider comes out of the mouth.”

“[The spiders] were CGI,” Nicotero continued. “I was at one point like, ‘There was this movie called The Believers, where they had the spiders coming out of Helen Shaver’s face,’ remember that gag? Terrified me. This girl gets touched in the face by this voodoo priest and she gets a big boil. And at one point, the boil explodes and they had a prosthetic with a tube and the make up guys had a funnel and they were putting spiders in and they–my friend did it–he took the funnel off and blew in the tube and the spiders went all over her face. So for a split second I’m like, ‘I’m going to fucking face my fears and do spiders. And then they’re like, ‘Yeah, no, it costs too much money.’ I went, ‘Oh thank god!’”

Our apologies for making the below GIF. Sorry for the nightmares.