If you have never witnessed a horror movie before, then Whispering Corridors will more than likely scare you. For someone like me, who has an entire bookcase devoted to horror movies, there was only one moment in the feature that caused me to jump. Although Whispering Corridors contains elements that are quintessential to the horror genre, it works best as a character drama, shrouded by mystery and suspense, revealing to us the hardships of education, especially in South Korean culture, and the importance of friendship.Though released in 1998, Whispering Corridors has lost none of its poignancy, and though I was late to jump on board the Whispering Corridors franchise (none of the films were ever released in my country), the movie is surely one that should not be missed. If you are after a horror movie that will scare the pants right off you, I'm afraid by the end, your trousers will still be firmly attached to your legs. At the same time however, Whispering Corridors is able to grab your attention right from the opening scene, and refuses to let go, even after you've ejected the disc from your player.Eun-young (Mi-yeon Lee) is a teacher, only recently employed at the same all girls high school she attended as a student nine years earlier. Her time there is far from normal after receiving an ominous phone call from her former home room teacher Mrs. Park, concerning her best childhood friend Jin-ju, who tragically died on campus, but is suspected of haunting school property. Immediately after this phone call, Mrs. Park's life takes a turn for the worse, and a group of students the next morning find her hanging from an overpass.Alongside Eun-young, three characters strongly focused upon are Lim Ji-oh (Gyu-ri Kim), a gifted artist, and the timid Yoon Jae-yi (Choi Se-yeon), who, although a bit of an outsider, is far more sociable than interloper Kim Jung-sook (Ji-hye Yun). Through witnessing these characters lives we experience the difficulties of the education system, the teachers doing all they can to benefit the talented intellectual geniuses of the class, while those under-par, or who put one toe out of line, are subjected to intimidation and cruelty.Despite many of the characters been teenagers, I found myself engrossed in their lives, not one of them ever annoying me, although the same can't be said for American films of the same genre. By returning to her high school, Eun-young is able to witness how nothing has changed since her time as an adolescent, as she remembers past events, while taking Mrs. Park's final words to heart. The characters in the film are brilliantly portrayed, the audience becoming deeply involved in their lives to the point that we aren't just sympathetic towards them, but genuinely care for their well-being.The suspense in this intriguing mystery is marvelously conveyed, viewers being required to experience every second of this film in order to comprehend the many plots that are taking place. Although there are scenes with blood, the film doesn't rely upon grotesque violence, nor in your face scares to keep your interest.Although there are a couple elements of the film that remain somewhat unexplained by the end, the audience, after receiving a plentiful amount of entertainment, are able to use their own imagination to concoct potential answers. With a series of terrific camera shots that compliment the story, alongside entertaining, well thought out characters, Whispering Corridors is an intelligent, moving feature that you simply must see.

Asian horror movies love to set ghost stories in all-girl schools, since that gives the movie lots of eye candy for gore junkies who also like to ogle hot teens in school uniforms. Unusually, the setting was more sharply drawn than is typical, with the harsh discipline, regimentation and repression of individuality so common throughout the educational world of the Far East playing a major functional and contextual role in the film. The high school setting provided a world of gossip, frustration, rivalry and threat in which the presence of ghosts was simply one other unpleasant aspect. The characters were drawn with an equally sharp pen, giving the movie more dramatic depth and impact than one usually sees as well. Normally, once the undead start knocking off the living in movies of this type, the horror is blunted by the fact that weak, uninteresting characters are being slaughtered, so who really cares? Here, good use of the setting and characterization made me interested in the goings on. Watchable and recommended.

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.

Whispering Corridors is a slow moving, but engrossing, ghost story set in an all-girl's school in Korea. There have been a number of Asian horror films released in the U.S. in the past few years, but as this one was made before most, I think of it more as a trend-setter than a copycat. While much of the horror is subtle and implied, there are moments where the horror slaps you in the face with some very vivid imagery. The rest of the story dealing with the relationships between the girls and the teachers is not the normal kind of thing I go for, yet here it's very well done. It doesn't seem as clichéd as most American films dealing with teens seem to be. The acting is top drawer and adds a lot to making the film work. I wish I could point out one or two of the performances that really stand out, but I don't speak Korean and all the names look alike to me.Whispering Corridors probably wouldn't work for those not patient enough to allow the film to slowly unfold. And while I may not have enjoyed it as much as some of the more recent Asian offerings like A Tale of Two Sisters, it's an enjoyable enough experience.