"Nightmare Teacher" Episode 5-8 recap

Eom Gi-joon really does a good "enigmatic villain" here. Note how Bong-goo always manages to subtly pressure the students into signing the contracts, by giving them just enough taste of the magical artifacts that backing down ceases to be an option. In the long-term sure, the situation will blow up spectacularly. But in the short-term, the students will be humiliated by the sudden disappearance of their surprising recent boons.
Note how so far the girl students have received objects that make people like them more, whereas the boy students have received objects that let them perform apparently amazing feats. I don't think the production team is intentionally making a gender-related point here. Goodness knows girls similarly can feel pressure to be the resident school genius while being a total slob at home, and plenty of dorky boys have made up stories about Canadian girlfriends. Yep, never thought I'd reference Kare Kano and Breakfast Club of all things in the same review.
But all that really just goes to the effective universality of themes in "Nightmare Teacher". This is a drama that speaks to the dark desires shared by teenagers all over time and space. And while the intelligence booster story may make for an obvious allegory to drug addiction, by and large the stories we see are quite mundane and even silly. What's the big deal about admitting your love story is a lie when people consume lies for fun all the time? If they didn't, I wouldn't have a job.
Well, it's because teenagers are young and stupid and really bad at thinking things through. When one of the stories flirts with murder, it's all to that same point. It's really easy to commit horrible deeds when all that's necessary to accomplish the task is writing down a bunch of words in a notebook. Likewise, fancy word-based body tattoos are an easy way to disguise, however temporarily, the existence of a chronic condition that makes the memory-loss sufferer much less competence than he thinks.
There we go again- Death Note and Memento. It's funny- I never come up with these analogies while actually watching "Nightmare Teacher", but they pop up pretty easily upon further analysis. While one might argue that this free association makes "Nightmare Teacher" a tad hackneyed, in broad perpsective, a good analogy should be about tying together wildly different stories with similar overarching themes. The inevitable disappearance of each student is always suitably spooky, trapped as they are in dark worlds of their own obsession.
Review by William Schwartz
"Nightmare Teacher" is directed by Hyeon Moon-seob , written by Hyeon Moon-seob and Jeong Yoo-seok-I and features Eom Gi-joon, Kim So-hyeon-I, Lee Min-hyeok-I and Seo Sin-ae.

Copy & paste guideline for this article
Always put a link back to the source and HanCinema permalink