WHISPERING CORRIDORS

In a strict Korean high school, a teacher (nicknamed "the old fox" by her students) commits suicide, or at least that's what it seems. Before hanging herself, the teacher managed to call her young colleague Eun-young to tell her that "Jin-Ju still attends school." Jin-Ju's story is well known to the teaching staff and students of the school... Nine years earlier, the girl died due to a tragic prank, and legend has it that her spirit still wanders the school. The ones who discover the teacher's corpse are Youn Jae-yi, a shy freshman, Lim Ji-oh, a girl with a particular artistic talent, and Kim Jung-sook, probably the most unpopular girl in the high school also due to the rumors about her alleged mediumistic abilities. The three girls will then have to face the very strict Professor Oh (who replaces the deceased teacher) and the restless ghost of Jin-Ju. Although it was a huge commercial success in Korea, "Whispering Corridors" (beautiful title) is not a memorable horror film and its main interests lie mostly in the harsh representation of the Korean school system. Indeed, from what is seen in the movie, education imparted to students in Korean high schools is extremely rigid, and teachers do not hesitate to punish them with violent corporal punishments. The figure of Professor Oh (whom students call "mad dog" for his extreme methods) presents a character bordering on caricature, who violently beats up a girl, harasses another, instills a climate of terror in his class, wears an incredibly tacky ring on his middle finger, and, to top it off, picks his nose while talking to his colleagues. But apart from the social criticism aspect, the horror side of the film is very weak, with banal suspense sequences and a permanent sense of déjà vu that culminates in a cryptic and disappointing ending. The true horror is, however, the representation of the Korean school (which defied strict Asian censorship) with teachers who continuously apply heavy acts of physical and psychological violence towards students, unimaginable in a European school system, which sparked the interest of the public who in South Korea rushed in droves to theaters (2 million viewers...). And it was precisely this success (absolutely unexpected) that launched the entire series of Korean ghost stories of recent years. Therefore, "Whispering Corridors" is a more important film than a beautiful one, and after watching it carefully, it is permissible to suspect that the horror part was merely a pretext for what is in reality a film of social denunciation. It is still worth a look, but the sequel (Memento Mori) is definitely better.