Another good film with evil children; and there can't ever to be many of those. This Mexican ghost-story somewhat resembles The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) as newly-employed tutor Julia (Marga Lopez) grows more and more wary of her student Sylvia's (Lucy Buj) imaginary friend Hugo. While the fantastic approach is maintained for the first half of the movie, Julia and the viewers being uncertain of the validity of supernatural presence, metaphysical forces are confirmed when Hugo (whose body has been turned into a stone statue by his black-magic practitioner of a father to keep his book safe until he resurrects in 1000 years) fatally rids himself of those in Julia's entourage who are set on destroying him. Meanwhile Sylvia uses knowledge taken from the book of stone to experience with a little black magic of her own.
While not as dark and violent as Kill, Baby, Kill (Mario Bava, 1966) or as visually polished as The Innocents, Book of Stone is fun to watch and interesting to look at, some of the mise-en-scene deftly accentuated by smooth camera work (as the girl-on-the-roof scene would testify) and nice composition. And although Buj is no Patty McCormack (who one simply can't fail to think of when watching homicidal little girls), the idea of having her teamed up with an even more spiteful little boy, a dead one no less, makes the source of the danger more interesting to ponder.
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