MEMENTO MORI (1999)
Directed by: Kim Tae-Yong and Min Kyu-Dong
Starring: Lee Young-Jin, Park Yeh-Jin, Kim Min-Sun

"...a teenage girls' horror flick that has to rank as the most inventive and eerily beautiful film of the year."

- Darcy Paquet

There is no subject matter more potentially salacious than lesbian schoolgirls, and if this was an American film we could expect the softcore "I gotta be me" psuedo-porn that features prominently in such syrupy Lifetime Lite fare as The Incredibly True Story of Two Girls in Love or Blue Is the Warmest Color. Memento Mori provides an alternative to gentle sapphic murmurrings, with something dark, something tenebrous, something wet and scary. This is a gay love story with all the fear and horror, all the throat-scraping, skin-ripping screaming that accompanies adolescent love, be it queer or straight, left intact. Because this flick's onto something that Hollywood isn't: teenagers aren't scared of masked psychos wielding machetes, they're scared of being driven out of their safe spaces and exposed to ridicule. They aren't scared the boogeyman will chop them up, they're terrified he'll read their diary. What's worse than being stabbed to death by Jason or Freddy? Showing up for school and no one will talk to you.

The first film by two male directors, Memento Mori is, ostensibly, a sequel to the high school horror hit Whispering Corridors, but with a totally new title, new directors, and a new cast (all first-time actors). The first gay film from Korea, the movie smuggled the love affair at its heart under the eyes of social censors by disguising it as a horror movie, and in the process it became a cult hit. A kaleidoscopic love tragedy things kick off when Min-Ah pilfers the baroque joint diary of two of her classmates who are falling in love. Fascinated, and horrified, she can't tear her eyes away from the literally page-turning high drama of these girls' lives. To her, all the clubs and activities, classes and coursework, look like window dressing next to the high-blown passions of this couple

Beautiful, backstabbing monsters, these girls in uniform flash their claws, fall in love, and rip out each others' hair by the roots. Sort of like all the friends you ever had in high school. And here, high school isn't the source of dreamy, golden memories but a hothouse pressure cooker where sweaty young things are sprayed down, stuffed into uniforms, and subjected to endless athletics and clubs in a vain attempt to siphon off their physical energy somewhere, anywhere, just so it doesn't grow into an appetite for the girl sitting next to you. Love and resentment flow in alarming quantities, and a kiss that stops the world is followed by icy rejections and hideous insults. If you were ever in love in high school it'll be a familiar feeling. Like driving a car off a cliff, you just aim, press the accelerator, and hold on. It's not a question of "if" you'll hit the bottom, but whether or not you'll survive the impact.

Love and hate this strong doesn't stop with death, and as time twists itself up into knots and past and present lose their meaning, so do the living and the dead and old ghosts come back to settle scores and take what’s owed to them. Deny them a kiss while living, and they'll insist on it after they're dead. Scored with some of the most head-splittingly surreal imagery ever put onscreen, this movie is like falling down the rabbit hole. Coded, veiled, told in frightened, fascinated whispers, Memento Mori is a movie for anyone who’s ever been so in love that they thought breaking up would mean dying. It's a remembrance of a time in all our lives when there was nothing more entrancing than another person, and we walked a thin emotional rope, where one misstep would strip us out of our shell and expose us to the jeers and ridicule of all the frightened, terrified people around us. Like reading a stolen diary it's a movie that's passionate, outrageously sincere, horrifying, embarrassing, and beautifully strange.