School Tales (2017)

Warning: I’ll need to spoil some of the film’s central conceits and its solution to ghostly problems!

The members of a Thai high school marching band spend much of their nights not sleeping but staying at school to prepare for The Competition where their true marching band mettle will be tested. There are the usual tensions, love triangles and low-key bullying among the teens, but things get really tense when the kids take some time out from making music to play around with the ghost legends surrounding their school.

Needless to say, that’s not at all the sort of thing you should do in a horror film, and soon enough, the kids are beleaguered from all sides by some rather freakish looking supernatural nasties that haunt them in daily more unpleasant ways. Fortunately, band member Pun (Ranida Techasit) is a bit of an expert in things ghostly, and band leader Ohm/Ome (Sedthawut Anusit) will demonstrate quite a bit more heart and guts than he himself must have expected he has.

At first, Pass Patthanakumjon’s Thai teen horror film School Tales looks and feels like a pretty generic entry into the annals of Thai ghost horror movies and mostly seems to spend its time having its characters race through a series of spook house style scares without much point beyond going “boo”. However, it soon becomes clear there’s quite a bit more going on with the film.

First and foremost, Patthanakumjon by far doesn’t stop with having his three ghosts spook the hell out of the teens but rather goes on to explore some actual, clever ideas through them. These, it turns out, are not exactly the spirits of dead school kids and teachers, but rather, they are the spirits of the dead twisted into the shapes of the schoolyard legends that have accrued around them. Consequently, the first step the teens need to take when it comes to fighting them is to learn about the basis of the ghostly tales and then making amends to the ghosts not based on the stories told about them but their actual fates. So, while there’s more than enough spooky stuff going on in it to satisfy, this is a film about a group of teens fighting sensationalized legends by acknowledging the sad truths behind them, and then trying to demonstrate what they learned by doing the right thing, all the while examining how tragic truth can turn into lurid legend rather quickly.

Even though this is certainly clever and not exactly an old hat approach to ghosts, the film could easily have ended up a moralizing tale more than a moral one if handled badly. However, Patthanakumjon manages to arrive at the latter approach with elegance and ease, putting the emphasis not on preaching about things but exploring them through characters and plot without speechifying or making things too easy and clear cut. We’re certainly meant to take away a moral lesson here, but this isn’t a film that puts its lessons before being a well-told tale with actual ideas, nor before being a horror movie. There is, in particular, a twist later in the tale that at once makes clever use of what the film has established about the nature of the ghosts, and the character of some of the teens which also works to make the film’s moral stance a bit more complicated, suggesting that not everything can be simply forgiven, and that doing the right thing will not automatically solve all problems or save everyone. That’s actually a bit of a ballsy move in a teen-centric film like this one, where solutions tend to be clean and absolute and sadness is something that just goes away in the end.

Now, the teens are relatively broadly characterized, and their problems sometimes not too far from a soap opera, but there’s an earnestness in the way the film and the actors portray the material that makes it involving and interesting even though we’ve encountered characters very much like these before rather often. The film treats its stereotypes more as archetypes through which it is easier to explore what it wants to talk about, yet it also knows the right moments when to treat them as people.

On the more direct horror front, there’s quite a bit to enjoy here too. Not only do I like the film’s approach to its school legends as tales that influence the perceived reality of the characters, the resulting ghosts are just flat-out creepy, created with the sense of corpse-like physicality and deformity mirroring either their deaths or their characters that is typical of the approach to ghosts in Thai horror. They are also just plain great practical effects used in scare sequences that feel more classicist than clichéd thanks to the great care Patthanakumjon puts into using just the right lighting, clever editing rhythms, and so on and so forth.

In general, while keeping with the surface slickness useful in all teen-centric horror, Patthanakumjon does put a lot of original and clever little flourishes into the moments that are not meant to be scary – my favourite moment is early on when the film’s title music turns out to be diegetic and played by our marching band (who will most certainly win The Competition if that’s what they get up to on a regular basis).

Craftsmanship, a thoughtful and intelligent script, a good idea of how to use clichés and when to drop them, and a capable young cast really come together into something special and effective in School Tales.