Scary True Stories (DVD)

In the early 1990s, director Norio Tsuruta (Premonition, Ring 0: Birthday) and screenwriter Chiaki Konaka (Marebito) collaborated on a three-part series of television programs based on actual paranormal events.

Scary True Stories: Ten Haunting Tales from the Japanese Underground is now on DVD for the first time in the U.S. The series is considered to be the godfather of the Japanese Horror film movement, but to me they looked and felt a lot like In Search Of… crossed with Unsolved Mysteries. It’s pretty tame stuff and definitely has TV-recreation caliber acting, but I must say I still found the episodes reasonably fun and entertaining.

Episodes include:

Scary True Stories

• The Lonely Girl – This story centers on the ghost of the girls’ gym, a specter who haunts the showers and hides in the bathroom stalls. One evening when a timid teen on the swim team gets left behind by her friends and coach, she meets the phantom face-to-face.

• Spiritual Flight – This one is about a little girl who’s guided by the spirit of her departed, clairvoyant grandma. At first, the child is scared – an out-of-body night flight over a cemetery terrifies her – but she soon learns that the supernatural can be, well, super.

• Mystery of the Red Earring – The best of the first go-round, this tale delves into the possibility that inanimate objects can be cursed by horrible memories. When a young teen finds a red earring on the ground one day, she takes the bauble home with her. But soon the treasure turns terrifying when she tries to discard it, and it keeps coming back.

Scary True Stories: Night Two

• The Gymnasium in Summer

• The Hospital at Midnight

Scary True Stories: Realm of Specters

• Be Gone Crone!

• My Friend at the Stairwell

• Paralysis

• The Black Hair in the Abandoned Building

Bonus features include: storyboards from House of Restless Spirits episode, trailers for Scary True Stories and Scary True Stories: Night Two.

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson