A Random Movie: Haunted School (1995)

Kids like to be scared

I have access to a preposterously large number of movies. I’ve decided to take a random number generator, pick a movie, watch it, and write about it. Today’s film: Gakkou no Kaidan, or Haunted School, or School Ghost Stories

For a kid, fear can be a form of rebellion.

Parents will often try very hard to keep bad things away from their kids. Things that might be dangerous, physically or mentally, are kept as far away from young people as they can be. They’re protected, and there is a real effort made to make sure they aren’t sullied by the worst aspects of the world.

Kids hate this.

There’s nothing a kid wants more than to be treated as an adult. They think they should be allowed to watch the same films as adults, read the same books as adults, play the same games as adults, and so on. They chafe hard against the limits their parents place on them. An R-rated movie is a goal, not a deterrent. In spite of a parent’s best efforts, kids are attracted like moths to things their parents don’t want. 

Did I listen to the Slim Shady LP when I was 13? Yes. Was half the appeal that my mom would absolutely loathe the Slim Shady LP? Also yes. When I listen to it now am I slightly embarrassed? That’s a third yes right there.

This is a big reason why kids love horror - they’re not allowed to watch a lot of it. If you’ve got an R-rating, you need someone else to help you watch it, whether that’s a parent or indulgent older sibling, and that’s half of the allure. It’s not that the movie is great, it’s that the movie is forbidden.

But if you’ve established that being scared is something transgressive, maybe you don’t need an R to give you the same feeling. Beginner horror gives a glimpse of the world you’re not supposed to access. Goosebumps books, for example, were plenty weird and disturbing but sanitized enough that parents only got a little suspicious - my main memory of the series being one where the main character turned into a bird. You could have beginner horror series’ like Are You Afraid of the Dark? It was even on network TV, so it couldn’t be too bad. Kids would often think up their own stories - built out of folklore, local mysteries, and particularly spooky buildings.

Which brings us to Gakkou no Kaidan, or Haunted School, or School Ghost Stories. 

The 1995 film, directed by Hideyuki Hirayama and starring a bunch of children, is a Japanese example of beginner horror. It’s a feature length adaptation of the weird stuff kids tell each other to scare each other. It began as a book series by middle school teacher Toru Tsunametsu, compiling ghost stories that students in Japan sent him. Most stories he received were about school, and so the series became about the same thing.

It makes sense that school was the main focus of these kids - school is where they spend the majority of their time, and school is where they meet their friends. School is also what everyone has in common - wherever they live, whatever their socioeconomic status, whatever their interests, school is always something they share. Abandoned buildings, mysterious staff members, what happens when the school is empty, that is fodder for kids to create mysteries. And since they’re drawn to being afraid, and inspiring fear in others, it’s an easy entry point for beginner horror.

Gakkou no Kaiden touches on common things in schools that would inspire legends among the children. There’s an abandoned school building, there’s a cantankerous janitor, there’s a dead kid who they don’t know is dead. Things happen when the school should be empty, they get trapped and spirited away. The film isn’t a single ghost story, but a compilation of the main themes and elements that a kid would include in their ghost stories. Japan might be very far from North America, but the kids aren’t that different.

This is a film driven by children. All of the stars are children - there are adults, but they’re not the center of the narrative, and most of them are either villains or ineffectual. It also plays like it was written by children. The story feels like something kids would tell each other. The twists are often out of nowhere and work as a slam punch line. In the opening scene, a man working at a school late at night gets increasingly disturbing phone calls from a girl who says she is nearby. She’s at the gate, she’s at the door, she’s in the door, she’s behind him… And she’s a big watermelon that eats him! It’s suspense followed by an incredibly goofy reveal, which is often how kids structure a horror story. It’s not lingering dread, it’s a punchline, something that makes friends laugh, dissipating the tension while indulging in some absurdist humour. 

The absurdity isn’t necessarily taking away the anxiety that starts the story. A scene where a kid is grabbed by an array of clay hands and pulled into the floor isn’t exactly lighthearted. But the slam reveals, shaky logic, and use of folklore are all what kids create for themselves. The adults behind the camera might be hammering it into something almost - but not completely - coherent, but this is the kind of thing a 10 year old would create if given the resources.

This also happens to be why a 39 year old man can find joy in it.

It has been a depressingly long time since I was a kid, but I still remember what it was like to be one. And even though these are kids from a different culture in a different country entirely, I was reminded of all those ghost stories we told each other when we were young. The places we weren’t supposed to go, the people who might secretly be giant spiders, the things that tried to eat you. It was fun to see something that reminded me of the Scholastic Book Fair and buying the Goosebumps classic Say Cheese and Die. For an adult, it’s pure nostalgia.

I don’t know what today’s kids would think about this - the movie came out in 1995, and I was 10, so it would have been pretty much right in my wheelhouse if I was a Japanese child. It probably wouldn’t have played as well in North America - if only because a kid straight up draws a pentagram, which would have definitely given a religious mom the vapours - but it hits exactly the kind of anxieties and desires a ‘90s kid would recognize.

Gakkou no Kaidan was a hit, and was nominated for a Japan Academy Film Prize for Best Screenplay - losing to A Last Note, which also won Best Picture - and Best Art Direction - losing to Sharaku. It spawned a series of four movies, and Gakkou no Kaidan was also adapted into an anime and a video game. One of the series gained a completely inexplicable English dub marketed towards adults, diverging wildly from its origins as a bunch of silly ghost stories for children.

Kids want to be adults, they want to exist without protection, without worrying what parents think, and they rebel against the idea that someone else is in charge. But, they’re still weird little people with strange obsessions and an absurd sense of logic. Gakkou no Kaidan is a glimpse of inside the mind of a kid, for better or worse.