Wishing Stairs (Yeowoo Gyedan) (2003)

I search high and low for decent horror films that will genuinely scare the pants off me and the result is almost always failure and disappointment and clean Calvin Klein's (oh yes, I am that classy). It is with great delight that I can tell you Wishing Stairs does not follow suit.

The Wishing Stairs of the title are a set of steps leading up to a dormitory of a girl's boarding school in Korea where ballet dancing is the name of the game. There are normally 28 stairs, but if you walk up them counting, sometimes a 29th step appears and will grant whatever you wish. Ohh, scary, I hear you all say in unison. Well, trust me, it is.

Naturally, as with a lot of 'I'll grant whatever you desire' fairy and folk tales, things don't go swimmingly and when you throw a rivalry over entry into a prestigious ballet school, together with an intense homosexual relationship, the 'stage' is set for wishing catastrophe.

It isn't perfect. It starts a little too slowly, some great opportunities for some great scares are missed and the last fifteen minutes is too confusing. But there are some genuine shocks here and, more than that, it is very, very, creepy throughout.

Hollywood, take note. You don't have to churn out horror film after horror film centered on a load of vacuous, shallow, heterosexual teenagers stalked by some cretin in a suit or monster. More engaging story lines are possible and the result (as with the Blair With Project) is likely to be more intensely scary. There is definitely a clear sense in Wishing Stairs that the intensity of the relationships (and, I might add, the performances) add a great deal of intensity to the terror.

Much of the first half hour of the film is taken up with involving the viewer in the relationship of the two leads. There is genuine time and effort invested in characterisation and character-relationships and it pays off. Especially when (in that dreaded phrase I'm prone to (over)using 'universal human themes' - particularly jealousy, envy and rivalry - come on to the horizon.

The three leads give good performances, and I should particularly mention An Jo, who is very effective as Hye-Ju, a girl with learning difficulties who's own affection towards one of the other girls (Kim So-Hie) leads to problems. The material is much more challenging that your typical Hollywood horror fayre and the young cast handles it well. The result is that the film is 'more than just a horror film' and concerns itself with human relationships as well as shocks. Hollywood would, as I say, do well to sit up and take notice. Non-American horror films seem generally to be far more effective examples of the genre and that is particularly damning, given the resources and funding available to American studios (not of course, as Blair Witch proved, that you always need a lot of money to make a good horror film).

Of all my years of watching horror films, a genre I do enjoy a great deal when it is pulled off, there are few I could recommend. This is one.

B+