In short: Guimoon: The Lightless Door (2021)

Original title: 귀문 gwi-mun

In 1990, a janitor at a country community centre goes on a killing spree with a shovel, murdering quite a few visitors and colleagues. Afterwards, the building is haunted by strange acts of violence, and is quickly condemned, Yet even then, it seems to draw people to their doom, keeping their spirits trapped between the worlds of the living and the dead. Particularly the last night of the Lunar Year is a dangerous time, for then, the moon of the afterlife rises above the building, opening the titular lightless door that seems to transcend space and time.

More than half a decade after the killings, an experienced shaman attempts to cleanse the building and free the trapped spirits, but is overwhelmed and killed herself instead. Some years later, in 2002, her son Do-jin (Kim Kang-woo), armed with years of research, the basic abilities that come with his lineage, and a spirit-exorcising dagger, enters the building on the last night of the Lunar Year to finish what his mother started.

He encounters, ghosts, ghoulies, as well as spatial and temporal shifts that let him cross ways with a group of film students exploring the place in 1995. He’ll also learn what actually causes the rather spectacular hauntings.

I had a lot of fun with Shim Duck-geun’s Guimoon. At its core, it’s yet another film that nearly exclusively consists of groups of people trampling through creepy modern ruins encountering supernatural stuff, and proceeds to present a series of not terribly original creep-outs set pieces in the manner of your basic haunted house ride. However, while there’s a certain lack of originality in the scares, and very little characterisation and character development on display beyond character set-ups necessary for the plot, the film isn’t lacking in variety. Shim seems to be very adept at all basic horror techniques, pacing moments of suspense and jump scares with quite a bit more mood building than movies about people walking through haunted ruins usually get up to.

The film also does quite a bit of effective work with the timey-whimey stuff. It uses the temporal shifts and crossings of times and space not just to fill in backstory in a visually more exciting manner than having Do-jin go through files would provide, but clearly also aims to engender a feeling of confusion in its viewers, very effectively turning your basic industrial ruin into a stranger and more interesting place than it would otherwise be.

All of which suggests filmmakers that have watched about as many of these kinds of horror movies as I have, have managed to identify their major problems, and decided not to copy others’ mistakes. Consequently, Guimoon turns into a fun, spooky time.

In short: The Vanished (2017)

Original title: 사라진 밤

aka Lost Night

aka The Body

Warning: there will be some structural spoilers!

On a dark and rainy night, the body of high level female corporate executive Yoon Seol-hee (Kim Hee-ae) disappears from the morgue before her autopsy can take place. There are circumstances that may have a hint of the supernatural - if the supernatural hits guards on the head from behind, that is.

Ironically, it’s this disappearance that gets Yoon’s trophy husband, pharmacology professor Park Jin-han (Kim Kang-woo) into trouble, at least with policeman Woo Joong-sik (Kim Sang-kyung). It is deserved trouble, too, for Jin-han has indeed murdered his wife so he can be together with his pregnant girlfriend Hye-jin (Han Ji-an). He has, however, shown no interest at all in blocking an autopsy, for he is sure that the experimental drug he used to kill her is absolutely untraceable. Still, Joong-sik, like a drunk (yes, he does have a tragic traumatic event in his past, why do you ask), angry dog with a bone, isn’t letting go of Jin-han now, even once he is threatened by political pressure and the common sense of his underlings.

At the same time, Jin-han is becoming more and more convinced his wife isn’t actually dead and everything that’s happening now is part of a sadistic revenge plan. Which, given what we see of the woman in flashbacks, wouldn’t exactly come as a surprise.

Lee Chang-hee’s The Vanished is, as is to be expected, a very slickly made film, technically flawless, with always at least competent acting and a well-paced script, too. In fact, Lee’s technical chops as a director and writer manage to sell one of those overconstructed thriller plots that should be not just implausible but utterly ridiculous when put on screen, not exactly turning the ridiculous into the sublime but into the very, very entertaining.

There’s some great use of visual and acoustic tropes of the horror genre used as red herrings, adding a degree of playfulness that never becomes too large to distract from the well-tuned machine that is the movie.

Of course, like a lot of thrillers of the type, The Vanished isn’t a particularly emotionally involving film, having to hide or obfuscate all character motivations, pasts and character traits so its plot won’t break down, sacrificing everything to the surface thrill. Which isn’t as much of a problem here as it could be because Lee never pretends that his film is anything but what it is, so there’s no disappointment in the twisty thriller indeed being a twisty thriller instead of a twisty psychological thriller.