Fridae

A high school student is forced at knife point by a kidnapper to tell a series of scary stories. If they're scary enough, he gets sleepy and doesn't feel like torturing or killing her. If they don't make the cut, he promises she'll get the cut.

It's Sheherazade for the K-horror fans, with the horror stories told by five different directors who have a total of 10 films between them before this, and more credible careers behind the camera as production managers. The lack of finesse shows. Whether it's a spooky story of kids home alone, a revenge story where a serial killer faces the ghost of his victim on a plane flight, a Cinderella-less story about two wicked sisters duking it out for the affections of a cannibalistic prince, a zombie apocalypse tale, or the framing story, it seems as if these supposedly up-and-coming directors have a concept of horror that's limited to fake dream sequences, melting faces (or eyeballs), and suddenly materialising ghouls who scream their heads off.

At two hours and five short stories, this very limited arsenal of scares starts feeling repetitive, wearing, unimaginative, and not scary at all — yet they are what you might expect from a sheltered, naïve girl in high school stretching the boundaries of her imagination to essay a task she is doomed to fail.

We recommend you watch this with plenty of alcohol and company since the sheer repetitiveness of its unscary scare tactics lend themselves to a drinking game. If you're watching this for a straight horror film for Halloween, we recommend the wickedly funny Cinderella tale, which actually succeeds in its social criticism of the Korean obsession with beauty, and the unscary but very thrilling zombie apocalypse segment, which evokes the paranoia and distrust of early zombie movies.