Whispering Corridors (1998)

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

A lot of fun.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

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.

After watching this movie, I was relatively disappointed. This movie has got a decent storyline, but there are just too many plot holes in this movie that made this movie bad. The movie starts of very well, with an extremely frightening scene that kept me glued to the screen. A student wanted to take revenge because a teacher did something to her. The way this Mrs Park got hanged was frightening. After the first twenty minutes the movie just got really bad. There were just really very long boring conversations between the two girls. They just seem to keep on talking forever. Then there was one silly part where another girl in the art room pretends to say maybe I am the ghost and smokes to act cool. Then another long boring conversation was carried out between the two girls again. This show was not scary at all. It didn't even build enough tension and fear to the climax. The violent acts of the teachers were the scary ones. A really big plot hole for this movie is who locked Jin-Ju in the art room. This was not explained at all. I am still confused what 1989,1993,1996,1998 is all about. And why this pattern? The girls rang and rang and rang the bells so many times and is just so repetitive. At least there was one scary scene showing Jin-Ju attacking Mad Dog. This movie really shows the school system in Korea very well. The last few scenes of this film were unsatisfying. I could not figure out many stuff that were happening. Why did Jin-Ju turned her head back at the end? Why was the classroom empty? Why was blood being all over the classroom? Lots of questions just come to my mind. The acting towards the end of the film was not good, it was not convincing. When Jin-Ju was about to kill the teacher in the end why did the teacher frown? Was she frustrated? Sad? happy? I cannot understand her weird expression. This teacher also acted in Bunshinsaba and her acting did really improve a lot in that film. I could not understand anything towards the end of the movie. However some of the good merits to this movie includes, cultural interest, mystery and so on..... I have so far only watched wishing stairs and this movie and wishing stairs is by far a much better film than this. If you are interested in the whispering corridors series, watch wishing stairs. My rating for this movie:5.5/10

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 picked up "Whispering Corridors" hoping it would be as impressive as the other top notch South Korean horror movie that have come out over the past five years or so but have to say I was disappointed. Although not an awful movie it seemed to move along as is just waiting for the right time to end. It lacked any real "scare" value. The story wasn't bad but not overly interesting. Given I always watch subtitles I tend to avoid judging the acting as much as possible because I think the delivery of a line is a large part of acting, therefore me not understanding it in whole seems unfair to the actor. In the case of "Whispering Corridors" the acting was notable sluggish and at times annoying. If you're an Asian film buff it's a movie to check out but don't get to excited about. If your not an Asian film buff I wouldn't suggest it for you.