A scene straight out of a horror movie greeted researchers when they shined lights on a dark Georgia swamp and saw hundreds of red eyes staring back, photos show.

It happened at the Okefenokee Swamp, as the University of Georgia’s Coastal Ecology Lab was conducting an investigation.

“We shone our lights around the boat basin and down the canal, and there were eyes as far as we could see,” the lab wrote in an Aug. 25 Facebook post.

It was alligators, hundreds of them, and the team was witnessing a nighttime phenomenon known as eyeshine, experts say. The effect is rarely witnessed in mass numbers, the team noted.

“Tapetum lucidum is a reflective surface at the back of an alligator’s eye that reflects ambient light to the photoreceptors, allowing alligators to see well in low light condit

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