Whispering Corridors (1998)

Whispering Corridors spawned no less than four sequels. It seems fairly unknown outside Asia, though, which is a shame on the one hand but on the other hand good for those of us who enjoy searching for gems among movies not so known in the West. Although the stories of the Whispering Corridor movies are independent of another, they all take place in girl schools where the students suffer from high pressure, competition - and from hauntings. It's not all horror, though. In fact, the drama aspect is very strong.Perhaps Whispering Corridors could be scarier. But it has a heart. It makes you care about the characters and the tragedies they're involved in. I've been impressed by the young actresses' performances and the cinematography. Even though the whole movie takes place at a school, it never gets dull to look at. All this makes watching it an experience so much more rewarding than watching an ordinary teen slasher film.

The look of the murky and desolate school corridors where sunlight cannot reach during the afternoon lessons had always given me the creeps. This movie was on the silver-screen while I was in Grade-10, in Turkey. My friends have gone to see it, yet they were so indisposed afterwards. However couple weeks before its screening, we've seen a Jennifer-Love Hewitt flick "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer" that was when we had finished that horror movie with belly laughs and roll in the aisles. I was curious to see and to know what was not to laugh of somebody's frightening of ghosts. Somehow, even though my friends were irritated of it, Whispering Corridors made a good box-office hit in Turkey. It must have inspired some serious masses, that in the first decade of 2000s' Turkish Horror-Suspense Fiction have used remarkable pieces from Whispering Corridors whether directly or indirectly. Then Taylan Brothers adapted a low-quality copycat from this already adapted adaptation. Making double adaptation for a piece of art didn't make sense on the payoff and the viewer felt it thoroughly. No one ever liked this adaptation; and it remained as a pathetic Turkish version: Okul(2004). That failure of Turkish cinema made me search for its origin. Yet till yesterday I hadn't have a chance to see this psycho-horror.Now watching it for the first time after 10 years of its release, it's clear to realize that Horror is no Horror if there is no Psycho in it. Whispering Corridors is para-psychologically successful and realistic. People know in secret that these types of extra-ordinary and super-natural happenings do really occur in real life.The story takes place on a country-side all-girl private school in South Korea, the year 1998. Presumably on a Sunday, the day before the new semester starts, the president of the teachers' committee of the school(Mrs.Parks) is getting killed right after the killer stole the 1993 and 1996 student yearbooks. We -the viewers- get 3 clues of the killer that she has the capitals P.C. from her desk, she commits her murders barefoot and she carefully leaves no evidence making the murders seem like suicides. After the semester starts, one of the male teachers of the school entrusts a class of girls with a task to hush up the rumours about the suicide among the students of the whole school. For this purpose, every week the committee of teachers choose "the clerk for the week" out of students of the same class. Meantime, there is a very strict racism storming in the air among the teachers for the student children of the Shaman families. A girl from the chosen class, whose mother is a Shaman priestess, begins getting affected while she used to call spirits to reveal the exam scores before they're announced or reveal whoever is virgin or not among her friends. That way, her friends always show respect to her, frightening of her but loving her at the same time. Soon, we get more clues about the murderer after she kills the night guard of the school. The murderer is very unpredictable, and the best thing is that each time when the mystery takes control on us trying to solve the murders; the murderer is getting killed. So, technically the spirits which curses the school and those students who are cursed-each time a new student- were the actual offenders. One by one girls of the chosen class lose their minds and in order to kill their victims they must trade their souls in with the spirits, so that the spirits can manipulate them kill their victims.Technical aspects are very low due to the low budget. Even though the audio quality is considerable. To capture the actors' voices more clearly I don't think the film crew had a boom operator though. The tensioned atmosphere is the true accomplishment of the camera movements, some degree of lighting adjustments, camera locations and chosen angles. Storytelling is very ambitious that despite the editing is mediocre, still the film keeps its fluency. Only watch out for the last 20 minutes! It becomes a captivity of total paranoia.While I was staring empty-minded at the closing credits, witnessed on how easy the deepest emotions of a human heart can destroy everything in one's life; I asked myself how in earth can someone make a movie like that so as to reveal what's unseen of the psychopathic murders. What a brave and hard job! What an amazing concept! If only it could have been produced more attractive to the viewer with a better screening quality, a better acting, a better screenplay, a better editing. The total commitment and self-belief of the production crew carries its importance to the highest standards; there we are taught how important the pre-production phase of a raw production material which was based on a very widely known and so told school rumour.If producers who are only looking for gaining box-office receipts with a horror movie and they hesitate to scratch and scrabble the concept of the fear; then they cannot reflect the reality or it just remains unreasonable as a work of imagination. For Yeogo Goedam didn't fall into this trap, it's a must-see cult horror.

I really didn't expect much going into this film. I think I'd been burned by too many mediocre horror movies featuring ghosties in the past, so to watch one of the grandmamas of the modern Asian ghost girl genre had me bracing for every trite conceit that could be thrown my way. Whispering Corridors surprised me. Rather than really being a flashy story about hauntings and killings, it turns out more to be an exploration of the impact of the brutal South Corean high school system on the youth that attend it, using the horror genre as the medium.First of all, I have to say that I wasn't frightened during this film. Not even for a brief moment. Rather than suspense and thrills, I was hooked into the mystery and dramatic elements that were at play. The way that the story is spun, there's no question as to who the ghost was or why it's doing the haunting, but rather, what the ghost's secret is. Now, astute viewers will pick up in the first few scenes of the film what we're looking for and I even managed to make the correct guess at it--although I really just had to watch to have my guess confirmed.Another interesting aspect of the story is that there are three stories going on. One about an artistic student trying to express herself in a system that cares little for her expression, another about a former student who returns as a teacher trying to make peace with her memories and the last about a student rivalry between a model student and the second-rank peer. The strength of this approach is that we anticipate the collision of the separate story lines and are rewarded when they do collide. The weakness of the approach is that the story has to juggle three (well, really two--the third is a B-story) protagonists and sometimes seems to suffer from a lack of focus.The film was clearly made in an era of Corean film-making that hasn't yet reached its more modern proficiency and the equipment/film stock used will have an almost grindhouse/direct-to-video feel to it for those who are only used to modern American/European cinema. Nevertheless, while the directing nor acting is spectacular, it is presented sufficiently as not to serve as a detraction from the story.All in all, this is actually a pretty decent film, even if it's not as much of a horror film as I was expecting. The interesting intertwined story lines and the use of horror to explore societal and personal burdens (and with some measure of tact) left me pleasantly surprised with Whispering Corridors. I can't recommend it to all viewers as the aesthetics might turn off those only looking for beautiful films and those looking for scary ghost or gorefests will be horribly disappointed. But this is an interesting look at the Corean high school experience as well as an intriguing mystery. So, recommended to those with open minds and a willingness to look past the genre for the story within. 8/10.

In the haunting opening sequence, we witness the mysterious death of a teacher at a South Korean all girls school. She is discovered by her pupils (her hanging body is a nightmarish image that will tattoo itself on your memory), and their abusive principal tells them it was a suicide. Before she died, she telephoned her young coworker and told her that "Jin-Ju is here. She's still alive!" Baffled by this, the young teacher embarks on an investigation to figure out what exactly is going on at this school. She finds that the ultra-competitive students are not what they seem on the surface.In its trailer, "Whispering Corridors" is credited as being the film that started the "Asian Horror Explosion." I'm not so sure about that, as Ringu is far better known and appears to have been released first. However, this truly is an excellent supernatural story that deserves as much recognition. While the movie leans heavily on drama and mystery, the frightening scenes are very effective. Those that take place in the long ominous hallways in the empty school at night, as well as in the condemned art studio, are incredibly creepy and atmospheric.The performances by the entire cast, especially the young actresses, are excellent. Throughout the film, we are introduced to several of the repressed but competitive girls. There's the insecure nerdy girl who believes in magic, her best friend who is desperate to be popular and secretly wants to be an artist, the prettiest girl who is also at the top of the class, and the vicious-eyed girl who is second in rank and never utters a word. As the body count increases, the viewer is given several hints as to why each of these girls (as well as the violent and lecherous principal) could be a suspect.The film culminates with a sappy sequence that will likely cause you to eyeroll through it is duration, but it is easy to forgive this melodrama after seeing the chilling final shot of the film. The chronology may be confusing for some (though it is much easier to follow than many Asian supernatural horrors!), but all the sideplots are nicely tied together in the final sequences. What makes "Whispering Corridors" especially interesting is its strong underlying message of solidarity above competition in young women. Not only was I surprised to find social commentary of this type successfully incorporated into a horror movie, but I was doubly astounded to find it in one from South Korea. Yet, the messages here are especially potent because they are universal. I wish this unique horror film could find a larger audience because it deserves to be seen by more people.My Rating: 8/10