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Oct 30, 2009 By Evan Rytlewski Web Exclusive

There’s no such thing as ghosts, a determined teacher insists, trying to calm his panicked students as they’re picked off one by one in the hit 2008 South Korean horror film Death Bell. Frightening though they may be, ghosts are cheap plot constructs, especially in J-horror films, where they can haunt electronic devices, manifest themselves however they’d like and generally make up their own logic as they go along. Death Bell may borrow some of its ghoulish imagery from J-horror, but it eschews the genre’s freeform storytelling. Whatever or whoever is killing students in Death Bell is that much more terrifying because it’s probably not a ghost.

In plot and tone, Death Bell owes most to American torture films. 20 advanced students preparing themselves for a university entry exam are trapped in their high school and forced to solve questions posed over the school’s PA system by an anonymous killer. For each failed question, one student is slaughtered.

The death traps are brutal and perverse, and the death toll high. The school’s top student drowns in an aquarium, her death broadcast for the rest of the class to watch over the school’s television monitors. Another student’s mangled corpse falls from the gymnasium ceiling, splattering on his classmates, who tremble, vomit and piss themselves. Soon the class splinters into factions, with some students fending for themselves as others try to crack the killer’s puzzles.

Death Bell resists heavy-handed commentary on the academic pressures facing students—its premise itself is all the commentary required—and instead weaves a far more personal morality tale. Rarely do characters in horror films feel this real, and even the film’s barely seen killer feels well rounded. In a flashback over the closing credits, the killer takes in some quiet downtime amid the massacre. It’s the film’s most remarkable scene, and it’s coyly tacked on to the end of the movie like a deleted scene salvaged from the cutting-room floor.

Dead Snow is currently available On Demand through IFC Festival Direct.

www.ifcfilms.com/films/deathbell

Author rating: 8/10