The Well is inspired by the HP Lovecraft short story The Rats in the Walls (1923), in which a man discovers an opening in his basement that leads down into the remnants of a hidden slave village below the surface. In The Well, the protagonist (the Scientist), finds an old well in a forest and descends downwards into the well, discovering another deeper well below that, and another below that, until finally uncovering a creature at the bottom and quickly attempting to ascend back out of the well. Approximately half way down, the Scientist discovers a fungus that blows spores into her face, leading to a hallucinatory sequence that leaves the entire rest of the film in question as to what is reality and what is hallucination.