The School

The Yeogo goedam films

Certain institutions are peculiarly suited to melodramatic representation. Extreme examples would be prisons and mental hospitals. With their forcible incarceration, rigid rules and overall sense of claustrophobia, such institutions create a pressure on the inmates, the sort of pressure that triggers the emotional and violent outbursts of melodrama. The same may be said of certain enclosed military worlds, such as the submarine in Below. Though less extreme, strict school systems as in South Korea may serve to generate similar tensions.

This is shown quite forcefully in the YEOGO GOEDAM (‘high-school girls’ ghost story’) films. These constitute a highly distinctive series of ghost melodramas. Beginning with YEOGO GOEDAM/WHISPERING CORRIDORS (1998), the series has to date reached YEOGO GOEDAM 5/A BLOOD PLEDGE (2009). In Chapter 6, I have already discussed the second and most impressive film in the series, MEMENTO MORI (1999). The third and fourth films are WISHING STAIRS (Yun Jae-yeon 2003) and Voice (2005).

Each film is self-contained: there are no specific continuities within the series other than those pertaining to genre and to the nature of the school system itself. Apart from WISHING STAIRS, the films are all set in day schools, but although pupils and teachers go home at night, the narrative rarely leaves the schools – not until A BLOOD PLEDGE are there major scenes outside the school. Equally, only in A BLOOD PLEDGE do boys become an issue: although there are a few male teachers, this is overwhelmingly a female world. Collectively, the films deal primarily with the complexities of the relationships between the girls: the intense but often shifting friendships; the individual aspirations; the insecurities; the petty disputes; the hierarchical conflicts; the sexual tensions; the bitchiness; the gossip; the bullying and many other features. As in MEMENTO MORI, emotionalism runs like a current through the girls’ interactions, and it's as though the ghosts in the films arise partly out of the complex of teenage angst and help to express it.

At the same time, the films are also about the schools as educational establishments. A school is another institution with rules and hierarchies, where (here young) people are forcibly gathered together whether they wish to be there or not.