The Scarecrow

• The Scarecrow was the first New Zealand feature ever invited to the Cannes Film Festival, screening in the non-competitive Directors' Fortnight (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs) sidebar in 1982.
• John Carradine, 76 at the time and in declining health, plays villain Hubert Salter — a necrophiliac traveling hypnotist boarding at the town undertaker's — in what's widely regarded as one of the strongest performances of his final decade.
• The film is adapted from Ronald Hugh Morrieson's 1963 novel of the same name and was released in the US under the alternate title Klynham Summer.
• Director Sam Pillsbury set the story in Morrieson's signature fictional milieu: a small, repressed early-1950s New Zealand town where a serial killer's arrival cracks open the community's buried sexuality and violence.

Salter reads less like an external monster dropped into Klynham than like the town's own denial given a face — the murders expose rot that was already there, and the outsider just makes it visible.

Ned's obsessive fear for Prudence's safety can be read as much about his own anxious coming-of-age and discomfort with her transition into womanhood as it is an accurate read of the actual danger she's in.

Because Pillsbury keeps every killing off-screen and never fully resolves the mystery on camera, whether Salter is guilty of all the murders — or whether the town's rush to blame the sinister outsider covers for something closer to home — is left genuinely ambiguous by design.

A traveling hypnotist rolls into the dead-end New Zealand town of Klynham in the early 1950s and settles in at the undertaker's place — and girls start turning up dead in the woods. Teenager Ned Poindexter and his buddy Les are just trying to get their stolen chickens back from the local bully when they stumble into the edge of the killings, and Ned starts watching his own sister Prudence, fast becoming a woman, with a dread he can't shake. Pillsbury never puts a murder on screen — this is a mood piece, small-town rot and repressed sex and violence simmering under a Depression-era surface, with Hubert Salter (John Carradine, in one of the best late-career turns he ever gave) as the outsider everyone's afraid of and maybe should be. It's less about who did it than about a kid finding out how much darkness a nice little town can hide.