Oscar-winning film-maker Guillermo del Toro co-wrote and produced this 60s-set teen horror that has proved to be something of a sleeper hit.
The film is adapted from a trilogy of young adult-targeted anthology horror books, the first of which was published in 1981. Although they had a much larger cultural presence in the States than in New Zealand, many of the stories were riffs on familiar urban myths shared on many a Kiwi playground.
Instead of making an anthology film comprised of separate shorts, Del Toro and his collaborators have strung together several of the Scary Stories into a single, linear tale of a group of teenagers in 1968 who discover their small town has a dark history, and they are going to suffer for it.
That history concerns a convoluted mythology involving a cursed book, a common motif in the work of Del Toro often emphasises the power of narrative. As the film repeatedly states: "Stories heal. Stories hurt."
The stories that made it to the big screen range from the overtly horrific - an abused scarecrow stalks a bully in a cornfield - to the ickier side of things: a germ-phobic finds a toe in his soup. Indeed, there is a surfeit of gross-out moments here, no surprise considering Del Toro's involvement.
