Karutha Chilanthi is the Malayalam translation of Jeremias Gotthelf's famous 1842 Swiss gothic novella,The black spider.The story is a dark moral allegory where desperate villagers make a dangerous pact with the Devil to complete an impossible task demanded by a tyrannical knight. When the villagers try to trick the Devil out of his payment an unbaptized newborn baby a cursed black pustule on a woman's cheek bursts open, unleashing a deadly plague of monstrous black spiders that terrorize the valley.