19/23
The crew of a horror web series travel to an abandoned asylum for a live broadcast. As they venture deeper into the nightmarish old building, they soon encounter much more than they bargained for. The filmmakers were unable to obtain filming permission from the South Korean government for the actual hospital, so scenes of the film set in Gonjiam were actually shot at the National Maritime High School in Busan, with the production crew sticking closely to the hospital’s layout to recreate the exact same exterior and hallways. Charlotte constantly looks to the side as the group stands outside the hospital. She obviously responds by smiling at whoever it is. References Return to House on Haunted Hill (2007). I’m usually critical of found footage horror, as it’s usually unnecessary and doesn’t add anything else to the story. Usually, found footage films do better than “normal” films. This is not the case with Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum. With the latest cutting edge technology and a reason the actors know how to handle a camera, it serves the purpose of this film brilliantly. There is little shaky cam and other “effects” that you usually see in found footage, which in my opinion ruins the film. The story itself is pretty standard: 7 young “ghost hunters” enter an old mental asylum, mainly for viewership and profit, which makes the film more realistic than other similar films. The pacing of the film is pretty slow and nothing really happens in the first half, but it’s worth it! I was originally going to give it a 6, but since this is a horror film and one of the scariest of its subgenre that I’ve ever seen, I upgraded to a 7. If you want a scary film without too much plot, this is the film for you.
