Unlike the pristine, marble-smooth corpses of Departures, the bodies in Sohn Tae-wung's gory ghost story Cadaver are exactly what you would think a dead body would look like. In fact, they go one better: Much of the film's downtime between red-eyed specters and self-mutilations is spent in a large autopsy room where skin is peeled-back to reveal all your compacted innards underneath that cold cobalt-blue-and-gray skin.

That isn't to say that this is some sort of abstract reimagining of Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, in which we were invited to witness a detailed, real-life autopsy in grainy 16mm. No, sadly, no such metaphysical experiments are found in Cadaver, one of the half-dozen films IFC has hand-picked for its attempt to resuscitate the midnight movie. The umbrella term which was once defined through works by Alejandro Jodorowsky, George A. Romero, and Kenneth Anger has now become the safe haven, at least partially, for J-horror flipouts, unfiltered Asian actioners and Gallic existential dramas.

Cadaver finds it home in the first category, though Tae-wung hails from Thailand rather than Japan. That isn't to say that the film isn't entirely, if not embarrassingly, indebted to pioneering, pre-remake works The Eye, The Ring, and The Grudge in terms of production design and direction. Like those movies, Tae-wung's film uses the concept of an unsettled spirit as its central shocker: Six med students begin to find themselves followed, haunted and, in some cases, dispatched by a singular corpse who has the power to possess a body and then, seemingly without cause, make them surgically remove their own heart.

Overlong at a bulky and tiring 100 minutes, the film involves the heroine, the near-robotic Sun-hwa (Han Ji-min), in superfluous back stories and side stories, many of which lead back to their instructor -- a likewise unfeeling elder nicknamed The Technician. A friend's deterioration into insanity eventually leads the story back to Sun-hwa's father, sent to the loony bin for murdering her mother with a pair of scissors. What may have initially been an attempt at creating a communal feeling of a school terrorized ironically makes the film feel pointlessly baroque and weighty, shallowly contemplative rather than urgent.

Though still frightening at moments, Cadaver is nothing if not conventional, aligning it more with the American films influenced by J-horror (recently: The Unborn) than with the innovative originals. Tae-wung's convoluted creeper may come to symbolize a state of ouroboros in the J-horror circuit, in fact. Unfocused and tonally deaf, the director has succeeded in making the shell of a horror story, but he never invites us into the central panic, the eeriness of the students' mindsets. Happily splattering digital blood, the film has one sincerely chilling sight: A dingy, rotten room covered in shelves of glass jars filled with human hearts. Nothing else in Cadaver features this understated concept of horror; rigor mortis sets in during the film's first few minutes.