(2006, Thailand, Dek Hor)
An enjoyable, but hard to classify, creepy ghost story school drama...
I really enjoyed Ring when it first came out, and immediately started digging around for other horror films from the East. I was surprised to discover they weren't all Japanese. South Korea was also in the Asian horror boom from the start, and other countries have then joined in the hunt for international success.
But I was initially disappointed by the horror films from Thailand. 999-9999 and Garuda had made me very wary... great posters but poor movies. Then along came Shutter (2004), a slick, creepy horror film loaded with successful shock moments.
Next came Dorm (2006), which I luckily saw in Thailand when it was released, and have been trying to spread the word about it ever since. Because of the poster and the initial premise, I was prepared for a full-on horror film, but Dorm is a well-rounded ghost story that's almost family fare. But it has atmosphere and scares and surprises, and contains elements that may not be considered suitable for children everywhere.
The film is set in the 1980's, and is about a Thai boy called Chatree (Charlie Trairat) being sent away to a boarding school in the country. He's very angry at his father, and his life is made more miserable because he's joining the school halfway through term. All the schoolboys sleep in one huge dormitory. A gang of four misfits pick on the new kid by telling him ghost stories on his first night, giving him as much to worry about in his new surroundings as possible.
They tell him that the school, the dorm, the teacher that's looking after him, even the very bed he's sleeping in all have a haunted history. He gets so scared, that rather than face the haunted lavatory in the middle of the night, he ends up wetting the bed. But during the weeks that follow, he discovers that some of the ghost stories might actually be true...
Dorm is part drama, part ghost story. In terms of tone, the best comparison I can think of is the marvellous Stand By Me. The cast is mainly children, but the situations they have to deal with are adult.
Dorm is beautifully shot, with fantastic performances. I'd love to hear just how much of the film was based on actual events in writer/director Songyos Sugmakanan's own childhood. It's also fascinating to see how similar and how different school can be in other countries.
Like one scene where the boys have an an outdoor night-time movie night, watching something which looked like the Hong Kong comedy/horror classic Mr Vampire (1985). It turned out to be a specially-shot pastiche using lookalikes (the whole uninterrupted homage is included on the Thai special edition DVD set).
Dorm eventually got a wide international release on DVD. In the UK and the US it was released by Tartan Asia Extreme, (which is misleading, because it's far from extreme). But apparently these have an audio commentary, deleted scenes, and a making-of featurette. The Hong Kong region 3 release has English subtitles, but the Thai DVDs don't.
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