Oct 112003
 
three reels

At a fine-arts girls’ high school, anyone who walks a set of 28 steps and finds a 29th may make a wish, or so says the legend.  Ji-seong (Ji-hyo Song) makes such a wish: that she will be the school’s choice for the ballet competition.  The obvious selectee would have been the beautiful, popular, and talented So-hie (Han-byeol Park), whose love for Ji-seong fits somewhere between best-friends-for-life and lesbian obsession. The wish comes true in the easiest way, with So-hie’s dead body laying in a parking lot.  Hye-ju (An Jo), a troubled fat girl, makes her own wish, that So-hie be brought back, with the result being hauntings and death.

The third in a series of high school girl ghost stories (following Whispering Corridors (1998) and Whispering Corridors 2: Memento Mori (2003)), Wishing Stairs is the first that can be called horror.  It’s also the best of the three, with a quicker pace, stronger characters, and considerably improved production values. It is, however, still frontloaded with far too much “typical lives of high school girls” material, and it adds a new problem: a cartoon character.

I was glad to see the exit of the After School Special tone.  At no time did I feel I was watching a filmstrip made by the PTA on the evils of bullying and on when you need to tell your parents about your teacher’s inappropriate touching.  In place of “girl’s true life adventures” we’ve got The Monkey’s Paw.  Just as in that classic, wishes are made and come true with devastating results.

The story is primarily Ji-seong’s, with a few side-tracks to see Hye-ju’s world.  I would have liked a lot more character development of Ji-seong, but compared to the girls in the previous films, she’s painted by Michelangelo. I had a sense of who she was and why she did the things she did.  More importantly, I felt for her.  So-hie is an enigma, but since she spends most of the movie dead, that’s OK.

Unfortunately, things are not so good with Hye-ju.  An Jo is a slim, attractive girl, so she wears latex fat makeup for the first half, and it never looks real.  But the makeup is subtle next to her wild mannerisms and expressions, which would fit nicely in a comical anime, along with smoke shooting out of her ears and little hearts floating around her head.  To make sure we understand that Hye-ju is unappealing, she repeatedly smears food all over her face.  I got the message.  In a serious film, the theatrics are distracting.  Once Hye-ju becomes possessed (or goes nuts), the broad comic behaviors decrease and the movie strikes a consistent tone.

The legacy of Ringu and Ju-On is easy to see.  The scare-moments (a pale, long haired girl compressed into a space she couldn’t possibly be in, strange twisted movements, etc.) are derived from those earlier movies.  They’re nice, but old hat for fans of the sub-genre.  If you haven’t seen other J-horror/K-horror, they’ll knock you out, though in that case, you should set this flick back in the bin and get yourself a copy of Ringu to see the genre clichés at their finest.

For the only film of the first three to have frightening moments, it is a paradox that Wishing Stairs is the one that can be given a pedestrian interpretation.  Hye-ju is neurotic, socially isolated, and over-dosing on stimulants.  Is she being haunted or has she merely taken the final baby-step into psychosis?  Ji-seong, the only other girl who’s haunted, is racked by grief and guilt.  She’s also under a huge amount of stress and has no one to talk to.  Add in that her supernatural sightings are almost all in nightmares, and it starts to look like this is a story of two girls in need of psychiatric help.

Wishing Stairs is a middle-of-the-road K-horror entry.  Where it stands out is with the stairs.  They really look supernatural.  While the movie as a whole will fade into the crowd, the image of those stairs lingers.

It was followed by Whispering Corridors 4: The Voice (2005).