A Haunted School

A high school student suffers strange, macabre visions of an undead schoolgirl. Her classmates blame it on her love of horror manga, but as she starts looking into the girl’s identity, she unravels a dark secret connected to her own school.

Meanwhile, the dead girl’s former classmate, now an adult, believes he sees her reflection in a recently taken photograph and decides to have the image analysed. As they come closer to unravelling the truth, their paths converge, but the horror grows greater than they imagined.

Haunted school buildings have been a mainstay of J-horror since the hugely influential “Gymnasium in Summer” episode from Scary True Stories: Second Night. Nearly always, the spookiness happens in an empty or abandoned building at night, but J-horror pioneer Tsuruta Norio reversed that logic in his first feature-length horror film, in which the hauntings often happen in the daytime and during class hours, without ever compromising their effectiveness. Extra bonus is a cameo by Kurosawa Kiyoshi as a media studies professor tasked with analysing the mysterious photograph.

– Tom Mes

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