Along with Chernobyl and the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic, an abandoned psychiatric hospital in Gyeonggi, South Korea was named one of the seven “freakiest places on the planet” in a CNN Travel listicle. According to legend, Gonjiam was shut down due to an alarming patient mortality rate, and even though, as Atlas Obscura notes, such tales are wildly exaggerated, the location would seem like the perfect setting for a found footage movie. But despite an inherently creepy subject, all the producers of Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum can make out of it is a thoroughly pedestrian horror movie that barely raises your blood pressure.
Gonjiam starts with found smartphone footage made by a pair of high schoolers investigating the notorious asylum; as they get ready to open Room 402, a reportedly cursed ward, the video abruptly ends and the teens subsequently disappear. Their amateur footage is contrasted with slick graphics from Horror Times, a YouTube channel run by a telegenic paranormal investigator who’s putting together a team of his own.
In a set-up that will be familiar to fans of ghost-hunting reality shows, each member of the young crew is armed with a pair of wide-angle GoPros to document their investigation—both what’s in front of them and their reaction to it—while the host remains at base camp to monitor his team’s coverage and broadcast it in real time on YouTube. Horror Times hopes to get a million views out of their live feed, which will make a lot of money for the host and his team…if they survive!
The set-up is a social media-heavy descendant of The Blair Witch Project, of course, and just like in the ur-found footage example, the actors’ camera rigs end up doing most of the heavy lifting for the movie’s visuals. Which means a lot of shaky camera footage, reaction shots and screaming. This is the meat of such movies, but if the resulting sandwich is little more than a triple-decker mess, it’s not just the fault of the actors but of director Beom-sik Jeong and the film’s editor, who fail to build any kind of dramatic tension from the sprawling footage.
The movie had some potential. The Korean film industry is famous for pushing the subgenre envelope, injecting ultraviolent life into the tired tropes of zombie movies (Train to Busan) and supernatural horror (A Tale of Two Sisters). Gonjiam has a few jump scares up its sleeve, but as the movie reaches its climax and the Horror Times crew members become possessed by the asylum’s resident spirits, the evil transformation looks positively silly: the young ghost-hunters’ pupils dilate and they start speaking in some high-pitched supernatural patois.
If you’ve seen a chihuahua unexpectedly snarl and bark at you, you’ve witnessed something far more unsettling than this movie’s most frightening moments. Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum may send the viewer in search of the real story behind the movie; if so, whatever she finds will be more entertaining than this 95-minute slog.
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