Film Database > Whispering Corridors 3: Wishing Stairs

Director: Jea-Yeon Yoon
Writer: Soo-Ah Kim, Shin-Ae Lee, Soyoung Lee (screenplay), Yong-Yeon Lee
Cast: Ji-Hyo Song (as Jin-Seong Yun), Han-Byeol Park (as Sohee Kim), An Jo (as Hye-Ju Eom), Ji-Yeon Park (as Yun-Ji Han)
Genre: Horror, Drama
Year of Release: 2003
Country of Origin: South Korea
Language: Korean

A staircase leading to the dormitory of a remote boarding school usually has 28 stairs, but every so often there appears to be 29. When someone steps on the mysterious extra stair, the horror begins.

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Broccoli is a type of vegetable. Yet, not all vegetables are broccoli. The former sentence was written in the desire to write a personal blog driven by an individual need for a fanatic rant on a Korean TV show, 사랑의 이해, which portrays intricate layers of quote-unquote “love” among four protagonists working in a bank—where multifaceted hierarchy is applied between the fixed-term workers and permanent term workers; between individual investees and corporate investors; between university graduates and high school graduates, et cetera, et cetera. (REMARK: The title of the show deliberately plays a game of homophones. Since “이해”—pronounced ee-hae in Korean, can be understood as both “understanding” and “(financial) interest” depending on the underlying traditional Chinese characters, this show can either be interpreted as The Understanding of Love, or The Interest of Love, if neither, both.) However, this paragraph would prefer to solely pass on the generic sentiment of “love” to the following sections, for it suffices enough to develop some necessary-ish digression.

From the day “Ditto” was released (19 / 12 / 2022), I became a person who could not listen to a single song other than “Ditto.” Occasionally, and probably out of daily stress of the coming mornings that are “yet too far (so say it ditto),”[1] I set an infinite loop on the performance video of NewJeans,[2] where the members dance with their too-long ties tucked under their above-knee length school uniform skirt.[3] Captured under the suffocating amount of affective nostalgia that I cannot be the designated subject of, I sometimes type “whispering corridors” into the search bar of JSTOR when it comes to a point where their full choreography has been substantially repeated. (17 minutes later) The previous sentence’s subordinate clause can be revised as follows: Captured under (...) I sometimes type (...) when a delusional glimpse of impossible fatigue is endowed on each of the member’s ideal-youth representing, pristine, flawlessly articulated faces that are nonetheless bound in my 13 inch MacBook Pro screen.

It seems instinctual to construe “Ditto’s” music videos as a two-fold iteration reminiscent of typical high school horror tropes. Effectually furnished with grammatical necessities in creating a high school horror atmosphere, e.g., modestly regulated hairstyles, analog video camera, classmates’ inconspicuously aggressive gaze towards their own classmate(s), and the conventional question of the actual-ness of an anonymous classmate (or classmates), the imagery that once seemed to illustrate teenage friendship or puppy love begin to yield their potential to that of the ominous. “Not just anybody, 너를 상상했지 (have imagined only you).”[4] Hence, helplessly submerged in the inertia of a shrill kick drum, we (no, I) dare to envision the wandering “you,” who encapsulates the foggy haze of school grounds, while shyly nodding my foot to the repetitive sound of that exact, shrill, kick, drum.

When some conjured a school horror film that developed a devoted fandom, Whispering Corridors 2: Memento Mori, as a convincing prototype of “Ditto,” some others (including me) arguably rooted for the third installment of Whispering Corridors series—Whispering Corridors 3: Wishing Stairs (hereafter referred to as Wishing Stairs)—which is infamous for its incapacity to success the sociocultural achievements of its predecessors. A considerable amount of comments in a popular Korean film review platform often described this third installment as a not-so-scary dish cooked with formidably scary ingredients, a failure of narrative construction despite the motive—a staircase bridging the campus and the dormitory where a fox that grants any genuine wishes resides—remains attractive and peculiar. (NOTE: The infrastructural function of the wishing stairs, i.e., connecting, if or, merging, the dormitory site and the school site, implies a structural division in spatiality—the primary site of manifestation of the absent presence, and the tangential site of an underlying (belief) system that makes the manifestation possible—in regards of constructing potent horror narratives. In the case of Wishing Stairs, where the entire running time unfolds upon strictly enclosed grounds of school infrastructures only, the dichotomy between the primary and the tangential appears coalesced: Where the absent presence is manifested is what makes the manifestation possible.)

Finally, this excessively elongated comment for “comment” has come to a requisite starting point (exclamation mark), to the very first step of the generous staircase intended to contain 28 actual steps, footnoted by the non-existing 29th step that will nonetheless appear on the call of the desperate subject who dares to climb it.

I need a change in my work-along music. (This sentence is in a different font for a reason.)

Found a remix of “Ditto” on YouTube that amplifies the original song’s tacit liminality. “Stay in the middle. Like you a little....”[5] The title of this remix, in which a still image of an empty hallway is actively placehold-ing a section allocated for some moving images in many other cases, is as follows: “Ditto - New Jeans but it is playing in the auditorium of a school and you hear it in the hallway.”[6] Reverbs and echoes, voices—traveling from afar, the legendary jump cut in the hallway of Whispering Corridors’ first installment, asking, “Do I still look like your friend.”[7] 

Still alone in the hallway, “you” are listening to “Ditto” being played from a distant auditorium. While “you” are subconsciously nodding “your” head to the shrill kick drum sound, a faceless body pays “you” a frosty back hug and whispers, “My way too long day; I wished to see ‘(you).’”[8] “You” stay with the chill for quite some minutes, but deep inside “your” heart, “you” know “you” wished not, at least not right then. It is complicated. I know.

Dearest fox, dearest fox, let me be the one competing in the Seoul ballet competition instead of So-Hee. 


Dearest fox, dearest fox, let me stay by Jin-Seong forever and ever. 


Dearest fox, dearest fox, please bring So-Hee back to me.[9]

As can be sensed from the three quotations above, what drives the three protagonists—Jin-Seong, So-Hee, and Hye-Joo—to climb up the wishing stairs is a mixture of jealousy and crisis of adoration (or love) informed by the environment—art high school—“where kids who have too promptly decided on what they want to do with their lives vigorously race toward the same goal.”[10] Nurtured by some longings for a slim body that would radiate beyond the standardized school uniform and some absolute fear that the competitive grade system imposes, the hearsay of the wishing stairs grow ever more present and unofficially official upon the school territory, no matter what sort of consequence awaits the one you dares to climb. However, the wishing stairs should be taken not as a static figure that stands in as a symbolized manifestation of the haunted but as a conveyer belt that constantly supplies the proper names (persons) into the protocol of repetition that relentlessly renders the proper names as temporary placeholders. If so, would the new student who is moving into (now long gone) Jin-Seong’s old room be able to not follow the tragic pathway of her predecessor?

The answer stays short and simple.
Never.

(SPOILERS: 1. The ending of this film is a fixed shot on a Polaroid film that Jin-Seong and So-Hee took together before Jin-Seong made her wish to the fox. After an adequate amount of time has passed to assure the audience that something off might be happening, photographed So-Hee suddenly opens her eyes with no irises nor pupils. 2. A few minutes until the end, the camera briefly features a new pair of feet—probably belonging to the new girl who moved into Jin-Seong’s room—climbing the wishing stairs. “This kind of thing... it doesn’t start by one person telling a story. It’s more like everyone’s fear just takes a life of its own. Perhaps that’s what everyone wants.”[11])

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[1] NewJeans, “Ditto,” track 1 on Ditto, HYBE Labels, 2022, digital single.

[2] NewJeans is a 4th generation K-pop idol group which achieved idiosyncratic success within the paradigm of the K-pop industry since its first debut in 2022. The group’s chief producer, Min Hee-Jin, is also known for producing f(x) ’s phenomenal mini album, PINK TAPE.

[3] NewJeans, “NewJeans (뉴진스) ‘Ditto’ Performance Video,” December 30, 2022, performance video, 3:09, www.youtube.com.

[4] NewJeans, “Ditto,” track 1 on Ditto, HYBE Labels, 2022, digital single.

[5] NewJeans, “Ditto,” track 1 on Ditto, HYBE Labels, 2022, digital single.

[6] Val, “Ditto – New Jeans but it is playing in the auditorium of a school and you hear it in the hallway,” December 21, 2022, remix, 3:12, www.youtube.com.

[7] Whispering Corridors 1, directed by Ki Hyung Park (1998; Chun-yeon Lee), 1:07:00, 1080p HD.

[8] NewJeans, “Ditto,” track 1 on Ditto, HYBE Labels, 2022, digital single.

[9] Whispering Corridors 3: Wishing Stairs, directed by Jea-Yeon Yoon (2003; Chun-yeon Lee), 1:37:00, 1080p HD.

[10] Kim Haery, “질투와 자괴감에 대한 이야기 <여고괴담 세 번째 이야기: 여우계단>,” cine 21, July 29, 2003, www.cine21.com.

[11] Ringu, directed by Nakata Hideo (1998; Toho Co., Ltd), 1:35:00, 1080p HD.

Film Database > Whispering Corridors 3: Wishing Stairs