Toe

The story is simple: a poor and hungry boy finds a toe sticking out of the ground and decides to cook it for supper. But at night, the toe's otherworldly owner comes looking for it.

Oh boy, the execution is absolutely wild. I didn't even know it was possible to make animation look this gory and disgusting. Several elements contribute to the unsettling effect: the film is entirely in black and white, the living characters look practically lifeless, and the dead ones appear disturbingly juicy and decayed.

The toe's owner reminded me of a puppet version of a zombie straight out of The Return of the Living Dead, and the unexplained steam rising from pipes gave off strong Elm Street vibes. The interior of the lodge also brought Evil Dead to mind.

Honestly, this film made me feel deeply uncomfortable from beginning to end-and in the horror genre, that's high praise.

So this short is a very nicely done little spin on the classic creepy fable of encroaching terror that's about what must be a seriously starving boy who digs up a big ugly weird toe that he finds sticking out of the ground of a fallow field and takes it home and uses it as an ingredient in some gnarly soup that he has for supper, and later that night as he's all tucked up in bed, whispering on the wind comes the rest of the monstrous walking corpse to get back its missing appendage, and it fully intends to claim what belongs to it one way or the other! Classic stuff, I think it's a very well done little adaptation and I love the look of the animation, it's like something between clay animation and puppetry, as well as a little gross too, a bit Tim Burton-esc! Very twisted and dark, and a very fitting representation of the shadowy classic spooky illustrations in the original book, not that it has that exact look but it's dark and eerie like those pictures were. I liked the little element that this added to the story at the end, suggesting that it's some kind of macabre cycle, whoever finds the toe has to replace the toe! Very nicely put together short animation and quite good for what it is, I'd love to see more stories from the Scary Stories books to be given this kind of treatment. Well worth checking out even if you're not familiar with the source material, this is one cool little scary tale! X.