The kids are telling the Kuchisake-onna stories with the same hushed and creeped-out tones with which kids in North America used to talk about that killer with a hook for a hand who used to stalk lovers' lanes. Even some of their parents join in ("The Slit-Mouthed Woman has become merciless these days!" says one dad), telling Kuchisake-onna stories from when they were kids. The current rumors say that she shows up at 5 p.m. in the park. Guess where three kids go at around 4:45, to test their bravery and the veracity of the Slit-Mouthed Woman stories?

Teachers Ms. Yamashita (Sato) and Mr. Matsuzaki (Katou) are walking around school after classes have ended, breaking up gossipy clusters of kids talking about the Slit-Mouthed Woman and erasing pictures of her on the chalkboards. There's a sudden earthquake, and something is unleashed from an impromptu tomb. The words "Am I pretty?" seem to float through the air, and those three kids in the park get their curiosity sated.

So who is the Slit-Mouthed Woman? Is she just some spook or goblin conjured from collective anxieties? Is she a ghost? A combination of the two? Or is she something more specific? With a specific tie to the past of certain people in this town?

Not a Mickey Mouth story

I love stories about the Kuchisake-onna. She's one of my favorite spooks, right up there with the Vanishing Hitchhiker, the Bell Witch and Mothman. In and of itself, Carved isn't as scary as any Kuchisake-onna story you can Google up for yourself in the middle of the night or wring out of a Japanese friend over coffee. Carved is a cheap-looking, choppy and on the whole so-so movie. There are some good jumps. But Carved doesn't have nearly the creep power of, say, the original Ringu.

Yet what Carved does brilliantly is capture the terror of being a kid. The scary force in Carved isn't just the Slit-Mouthed Woman. It's also this really frightening and confusing thing called "adults." The scenes in Carved in which kids share Kuchisake-onna stories will remind anyone who has told or heard creepy stories in schoolyards what it feels like to have a chill go up your spine while you brace a heavy book bag on your back. And there are scenes in Carved in which kids face the too-real terror of abusive households and unbalanced parents. "I wish the Slit-Mouthed Woman would take you away from me!" says one Joan Crawford-ish mom to her kid. While there are some really nice and caring parents in the movie, the nasty ones are showstoppers in their cruelty, able to give the parents of Running With Scissors author Augusten Burroughs a run for their dysfunctional money.

Carved also depicts kids in danger and in states of terror that most Hollywood-style horror movies wouldn't dream to depict. Carved plays hardball, not just with supernatural terrors, but also with the aforementioned physical and mental terrors of being under the complete control of rage-tweaked parents. The only movie I can think of that goes so all-out to scare the crap out of its kid protagonists is Dog Bite Dog director Pou-Soi Cheang's Gwai Muk (aka The Monster and Home Sweet Home), a truly demented movie that features a very different, non-supernatural iteration of a "slit-mouthed woman." Throw in the fact that the kids in Carved are all likable and cute, and Craved, despite its many and profound shortcomings, becomes a movie that's hard to shake off.