Gakkō no Kaidan (School Ghost Stories)note is a loose franchise launched in 1990 that has gone on to be of major influence on the Japanese horror landscape. The book that started it all was written by Toru Tsunemitsu, a long-time folklore enthusiast and a collector of ghost stories. In 1985, he was a middle school teacher and he realized that he could ask his students if they knew of any ghost stories. He received 160 stories in the first ten days alone. Surprised and intrigued, Tsunemitsu shifted and narrowed his research to Urban Legends, eventually writing a selection of them down in a book aimed at children. Publication occured by Kodansha in 1990 under the title Gakkō no Kaidan and with illustrations by Kihachi Nara.
The book was a bestseller and got turned into a Long-Running Book Series of which the current last entry came about in 2015. The first adaptation was a TV drama in 1994 and the second a movie, Gakkou No Kaidan, in 1995. The movie in particular increased the audience for school-related ghost stories and they've steadily seen more and more use in fiction since. Essentially, what GeGeGe no Kitarō is to folklore, Gakkō no Kaidan is to urban legends. Examples of these legends include the Old School Building being haunted, Toilet Hanako, the moving anatomy model, Beethoven leaving his portrait to play a haunting tune on the piano, Ninomiya Kinjiro's statue running around, a haunted mirror, the number of steps of a set of stairs changing or the fourth step being a gate to the realm of the dead, the teke-teke hunting for legs, the kuchisake-onna waiting in alleyways, and so on. Many legends also have extensive variations of how any of these modern youkai go about their business, such as what exactly the kuchisake-onna wants to hear when she asks if she's pretty.
To fully understand why Gakkō no Kaidan gained the traction it did, one has to look at the state of horror in 1990. In 1988 and 1989, Tsutomu Miyazaki, the Otaku Killer, murdered four young girls and the media emphasized Miyazaki's collection of anime and horror videotapes among the factors behind his atrocities. This caused a moral outcry that pushed content that had earlier been readily accessible out of the average store's offering. Horror wasn't targeted so much as it was violence that had to go, but because those two were closely tied there wasn't a whole lot of horror left at the turn of the decade. Gakkō no Kaidan is a collection of ghost stories by children for children that in the 1990s also hit a nostalgic note with adults because several of the urban legends included were already around when they were young. It's not devoid of violence, but the violence is familiar. Therefore, Gakkō no Kaidan uniquely could revive the societal enthusiasm for horror.
Most of the franchise is an example of No Export for You. Only three entries have been released in English: the first and fifth movies, and the 2000 anime Ghost Stories (yep, that one with the offensive Gag Dub). To complicate matters further, each entry has a different localized title and it's easy to miss they're related.
Compare Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
Works include:
Anime and Manga- Ghost Stories (2000)
Films — Live-Action
- Gakkou no Kaidan (1995)
- Gakkou no Kaidan 2 (1996)
- Gakkou no Kaidan 3 (1997)
- Gakkou no Kaidan 4 (1999)
- Kotodama – Spiritual Curse (2014)
Literature
- Gakkō no Kaidan (1990)
Live-Action TV
- Gakkō no Kaidan (1994)
- Gakkō no Kaidan (2012)
- Gakkō no Kaidan (1995, Sega Saturn)
