Whispering corridors

Title - Whispering Corridor (Ghost School 1)

Language - Korean

Genre - Horror, J horror, Ghost

Whispering Corridors is the first of (at the time of writing) 5 films in the ‘Ghost school’ series.  The films are only connected by their themes and settings, the stories are do not follow on.  

Whispering corridors starts with  Mrs  Park, a  teacher in a girls school looking for something in the old school yearbooks, she then phones someone to tell them  Jin-Ju (who is dead) is there and has always been there.  The next day Mrs Park is found hanging from a bridge.

The film then follows two sets of interlocking story lines,, the main one being two students, Jae-Yi and Ji-Oh and how they react to the death of Mrs Park and the activities around them a second but equally as important story, told in flashbacks of what happened to Jin-Ju.

The main story starts when Jae-Yi and Ji-Oh discover the body of Mrs park whilst being on cleaning duty.  All of the students that were in Mrs Park’s class are instructed to keep her death a secret by Mr Oh, the head of the school.  As the film progresses it becomes apparent that there is more to Mrs Park’s death than just suicide and Miss Hur, an ex pupil and now new teacher starts to investigate what happened.  It was Miss Hur that Mrs Park had phoned and she is trying to find out why Mrs Park seems to think that a dead student is involved.  

The students are not upset when Mrs Park is gone as she is not a well liked teacher, although we do not find out why she is so disliked until later in the film.  The students are upset when Mr Oh (also known as mad dog ) takes over the classes.  Mr Oh is abusive to some of the students and flirting with others, with most of his abuse taken out on Ji-Oh.  when Mr Oh disappears Miss Hur starts to look at Ji-Oh to see if there is a connection.

As the film unfolds we find that Miss Hur was a classmate and friend of Jin-Ju and may have had some connection to her death.

Although Whispering corridor is a ghost film/horror it also focuses on the relationships and emotions of the characters  the main idea of the film is about conforming and is it worth sacrificing friendship to get along in life.  There are two characters in the who do not match what is supposed to be the norm and both of these are victimised, when she was alive Jin-Ju was picked on  because her mother was a witchdoctor and the pressure that was put on her only friend to leave her was what ultimately lead to her death.  In the same was some of the teachers try to isolate Ji-Oh making her life run parallel in many ways to Jin-Ju and this is what leads Ji-Oh to think she may be possessed by the spirit.

The film show the conflict that can be felt if a person is made to conform but it also show how things don’t really change over time, this is mainly shown in the parallels between Ji-oh and Jin-Ju, even when the cause of the problem, in this case Mrs Park, is removed it is just replaced by another, somewhat worst one in the form of Mr Oh.  Mrs Park, for all her faults was looking out for Miss Hur even if it was at the detriment of Jin-Ju whereas Mr Oh is just abusive.

The question is, is Jin-Ju right, will it take a big, almost supernatural force to change things or can one person make a enough of a difference like Miss Hur says.