| The opening images are nice; but then when I meet the cast of prospective victims in their high school setting, I wonder if maybe I’m not really in the mood for another high school exam-time horror movie. Since I’m too lazy to get up and change the disc, I decide to give it a few more minutes to lure me in. Then things start to develop. There’s a nice collection of faces giving a variety of panic-stricken reactions. There are the few wacky, troubled, or angry kids; the possible romantic threads; some interesting teachers who could go either way; and, after all, I remember based on personal experience, high schools are great settings for horror. Then stuff starts seriously hitting the fan, and I’m hooked. The film has a solid location in horror-film land. People make foolish decisions that nobody in their right mind would make. Everybody starts looking suspicious, from the wise-guy student to the security guard; from the stars to the bit players. Patterns start developing, but not clearly enough to give any solid clues. Everything goes the fiendishly clever killer’s way – no technical glitches, no prospective victim that he or she can’t get to, nobody who can physically overwhelm him or her, not even a spelling mistake. And is the killer a ghost or living being? – it could go either way. In other words, the viewer is thinking all the time trying to figure out the mortal state of the killer (ghost or living?), the motive, and the story that brought things to the stage of horror. And all that thinking goes on to the very end of the film; and once the film is over, you make plans to see it again to catch the clues that you missed. But there are also scenes that you’d like to take a more careful look at. I’d love to see them on a theater screen in order to appreciate their true intended power.
There’s also the wonderful Korean everyday realism. It was in Korean films that I discovered that it was normal for film characters to go to the bathroom. Here I find out that high school girls do have periods; and that when some people are really frightened, they wet their pants. Isn’t that perfectly normal? |
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