A crude smartphone video shows two giggling high school boys trespassing into what appears to be a rundown hospital corridor. They try to open the door to room 402, and then the video abruptly terminates. The scene shifts, and Ha-joon, a YouTuber running a popular program Horror Times, vows to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding Korea’s most famous haunted mental asylum, Namyang Mental Hospital in Gonjiam. A team of eager volunteers is assembled: Brave Girl Ji-hyun (Park Ji-hyun from The Chase), camera expert Seong-hoon, the outwardly calm commentator Seung-wook, Nice Girl Ah-yeon, Scaredy-Cat Je-yoon, and Glamour Girl Charlotte. Equipped with state-of-the-art video gadgets that simultaneously film their own faces and the objects in front of them, they set up camp near the decrepit, long-deserted Namyang Hospital and wait until the clock hits midnight.
Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum is a modestly-budgeted found footage horror film. Its primary PR hook is that its setting, Namyang Mental Hospital, is a real place, once profiled by CNN as one of the seven creepiest deserted places in the world, along with Japan’s Hashima (a.k.a. Battleship Island), Russia’s Chernobyl and Mexico’s Isla de las Muñecas. The publicity has clearly helped the film’s box office performance (and reportedly stoked the irritation of the estate’s owners, who have long suffered from thrill-seeking hooligans: the hospital site in real life is ensconced in a peaceful residential area, and is disappointingly mundane).
For a jaundiced fan of horror cinema like myself, it’s hard not to suppress a yawn as soon as the word “found footage” is mentioned. Yes, it is a low-budget horror film that neither has anything profound to say about the human condition, nor is much interested in nuanced characterization. But once you take these limitations into account, the film reveals itself as a surprisingly decent nail-biter. It helps enormously that the writer and director is Jung Bum-shik, who has proven his mojo with the now-classic Epitaph and the “Escape” segment of Horror Stories 2, still one of the weirdest pieces of Korean genre cinema I have seen. Jung knows how to juggle disparate and potentially confusing visual elements, to keep the flow of the story logical, and to make his young cast believable and sympathetic. Admittedly some ideas, such as a bit of graffiti that switches from “Let’s live” (salja) to “Suicide” (jasal) – likely a reference to the “Redrum” scene in The Shining – are borderline silly. But many of the scare effects, especially those focused on spatial displacement a la Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby, Kill!, are genuinely effective. The sound design and almost imperceptible ambient music are also first-rate.
Intriguingly, the youth-oriented Gonjiam shares a few thematic concerns with the more historically-minded Epitaph. There is a nod, in the form of an actual government newsreel, to anti-Communist paranoia under the Park Chung Hee regime as one of the underlying sources of the hospital’s “curse”. Also, one of the movie’s most jolting set pieces duplicates the deservedly notorious, hideously scary “lullaby” scene from the 2007 film. The overarching theme of ghosts as individuals temporally and spatially trapped in modern Korea’s traumatic and unsavory past, might be another shared trait.
Although not earth-shaking, Gonjiam more than fulfills its modest expectations and showcases Jung’s considerable prowess as a horror specialist. Based on the evidence displayed here, Netflix or Amazon should endow Jung with a $5 million budget, so he could fully indulge his devious imagination, without being constrained by the commercial calculations of Korean theater-chain owners.
Jung Bum-shik
Born in 1970, Jung Bum-shik studied film producing at Chung-Ang University’s graduate school. He made his debut with the acclaimed horror film Epitaph (2007), co-directed with his cousin Jung Shik. He then went on to take part in two high-profile horror-omnibus projects, contributing a 27-minute segment “A Fairy Tale of the Sun and Moon” to Horror Stories, and the following year, a 31-minute episode “Escape” to Horror Stories 2. Outside of the horror genre, he directed the comedy-romance Working Girl (2014). Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum is his biggest hit to date.
FILMOGRAPHY
2007 – Epitaph
2012 – Horror Stories (segment)
2013 – Horror Stories 2 (segment)
2014 – Working Girl
2018 – Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum
Kyu Hyun Kim