Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018)

Original title: 곤지암

Warning: the EMF activity meter shows “spoilers ahead”!

The merry crew of YouTube ghost hunting channel Horror Times has a great coup planned: a live stream from one of the most haunted locations in South Korea, the dilapidated Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital (which is an actual place with an appropriately dark history over here in the real world). There, the team – plus three young women as guests, because nobody likes a sausage fest – will try to wake the local ghost population and attempt to open the door of the mysterious room 402, which supposedly leads to death and doom for anyone attempting it.

Things do indeed become very spooky. The séance used to awaken the spirits has rather too good results, and things proceed from there accordingly. Of course, the early spirit manifestations are faked by the three core members of the ghost hunters; but soon enough, the real supernatural rears its rather murderous head.

At first, this South Korean movie by Jeong Beom-sik feels rather a lot like just another POV horror movie about ghost hunters actually encountering what they are trying to make money from. But where many (though not all) films of this type tend to be amateurish and awkward in production and structure, Gonjiam’s script (as written by Jeong and Park Sang-min) very quickly shows itself to be very tight and effective, going through the minimal necessary character bits and shots of young people farting around efficiently. Where too many films of this type spend half of their running time getting their boring characters to the place of their demise, the film at hand knows what its audience has come to see and gets through preliminaries in a quarter of an hour or so. From then on, things flow rather wonderfully: plot reveals come earlier and hit much better than usual, and the spooky bits start early and escalate quickly. Comparing a film’s narrative to a clockwork doesn’t always sound like a compliment, but when the clockwork runs as well as it does here, it is a good way to praise the sheer craftsmanship of the approach.

Which does lead to the main criticism one could raise against Gonjiam, namely its lack of depth. Despite some nods towards the shadowier periods of South Korea’s history via its choice of haunted spot, there’s very little interest on display to say anything at all here - apart from “don’t screw with ghosts” I suppose – adding this to the group of horror movies that really only ever want to be a spooky good time for their audiences. However, the film is so brilliant at simply being said spooky good time, timing every creepy little and big shock perfectly, using every trick in the horror book so effectively, that criticising it for not also having Big Important Things to say simply seems to be beside the point and churlish.

The film shows considerable breadth when it comes to the shaping of its spooky goings-on, too, going from classic suspense set-ups and moments, over very folkloric inspired ghosts to the sort of spatial weirdness I typically find irresistible in a movie, shaping all of this into a real machine of increasing tension. Little of this is original, rather it’s the sort of thing where you can see the sources for nearly every single element, but still feel yourself dragged inexorably through increasingly great set pieces, mentally praising the filmmakers for their good taste in borrowing instead of criticising them for it.

Because this is a film about a group of people who actually planned their little ghost hunting jaunt beforehand, the POV angle is never used as an excuse for things to look a bit crap: there are a lot of cameras involved (not all of them held by mortal hands, it turns out), and nobody confuses them with salt shakers, so Jeong has free hand to stage his scenes like in any proper movie, using the POV basics as a sign of authenticity and to make things more intense for his audience.

Speaking of authenticity, Gonjiam has learned a bit from the books of the great carnival hawkers of our genre too, and so, as I’ve already mentioned uses a real run-down asylum for its backstory. Because the owners really did not care for a horror movie about their ruin coming to the cinemas (there was apparently even a law suit involved to keep the film off the screens), the film was shot elsewhere. Supposedly, the filmmakers then recreated as much of the actual building’s floorplan as possible for the filming. Which may demonstrate a deep belief in authenticity, or filmmakers who really know the kind of talk that’ll sell tickets. In any case, William Castle would have been proud.