Main cast: Kay Lertsittichai (Q), Pepo Nutchapan Paramacharenroj (Not), and Care Panisara Rikulsurakan (Tan)
Director: Thanadol Nuansut
People frequently asked me why I didn’t review more horror stuff from my part of the world, and I always answer that it’s because, since the 2000s, the horror genre over here has become nothing but one lazy jump scare marathon after another. In fact, I blame the brief fad of Americans falling in love with Korean horror films on the perpetuation of cheap and lazy jump scares in their horror films too.
Still, when Thailand comes up with this horror anthology series called School Tales the Series, I don’t see the harm in taking a peek at it. The whole thing revolves around haunted shenanigan in high schools, and since we are talking about high school, expect G-rated hormone-driven soap opera mingled with some gore and all.
Who knows, perhaps this show would be an unexpected gem, as Thailand had produced some of the best Asian horror films out there.
So, here it is, the first episode called 7 AM.
In this particular high school, there is a particularly deadly curse on class 6-4: at 7 am, the name of a subject will appear, apparently by itself, on the blackboard. By 8 am, when the school bell rings, any student without the textbook for that subject will be slain by murderous spirits and their existence completely erased from everyone’s memory.
Now, I wonder how anyone will know of this curse if whoever ran afoul of it were slain and then forgotten, but hey, horror logic, I guess.
Q is the only student that can read the words on the blackboard, so he would come in early to photograph the subject of the day and send it to their student group. You’d think they would be grateful, but they would berate him if he sent them things too early and if he sent them later. They also egg him to show them proof of the existence of the murderous ghostly teacher responsible for the writing on the blackboard.
Once he is pushed too far, Q could easily throw these morons to the wolves, or in this case, homicidal ghosts. Gee, I wonder what happens eventually to these kids…
This one is textbook horror 101 with generic ghosts full of make up that you’ve seen a million times already doing jump scares. You know, I still don’t understand why ghosts keep showing up behind someone when that person obviously can’t see them and hence be scared.
Oh wait, I do: this is the heavy-handed attempt by the show to scare me, the equivalent of the director reaching out from the screen to cup my cheeks and scream at my face: “Boo! Boo! Why aren’t you scared yet? BOO!”
Hence, there is nothing innovative or genuinely frightening here, just everyone in this episode going through the motions with the bonus of tedious teen drama. Thai folks really don’t like ugly people on screen, and that’s fine, were not for the fact that Q is supposed to be a bully magnet and he’s played by a pretty boy YouTube influencer that is more likely to lead a bully gang than to be at the receiving end of one. So yes, the teen angst feels artificial and even eyeball-rolling at times.
7 AM? It’s perfectly okay to wake up late and miss this one.
