Gonjiam Haunted Asylum (2018) Old School Haunted House Terror from Korea (Review)

Korean Horror is a little known entity outside of the TV format, and even though, like Japan, it has a reductive abbreviation to pack all of its horrors together in a digestible sub-genre (K-Horror), there’s no poster child, no Ringu, Cure, or Dark Water level threat. You could cite the Whispering Corridors saga but finding those in the West is next to an impossibility these days, and although a few did get the Tartan Asia Extreme treatment back in the day, they’re long out of print. Beyond that, the revenge thriller has brutally beaten K-Horror into obscurity, however with Second Sight releasing Gonjiam Haunted Asylum with their usual eye for excellence, there’s a case to be made that this may be the figurehead that the UK has longed for (or at least I have).

Gonjiam Haunted Asylum is a found footage horror movie, which means it subscribes to the conceit of being filmed by characters in the movie in long, handheld, unbroken camera movements. One of the more common stories within the sub-genre has a group of people visit a spooky locale with cynical or greedy motives, only for it to go horrifically wrong for everyone involved. In director Jung Bum-Shik’s hands (who’s joined in writing duties by Sang-Min Park), seven young Koreans head to the titular asylum, which is cited as one of the “seven freakiest places on the planet”. This is shown through a cold open where two young teenagers go missing near room 402, after which the film cuts to ringleader and YouTuber, The Horror Times, explaining the pertinent information on their latest haunted house project. After being introduced to the unlucky souls, they (except the person who runs the live stream) head into the dilapidated husk armed with cutting edge technology to find the truth behind the notorious asylum’s past.

In the West, horror has gotten a bit big for its britches, which isn’t to say it’s not enjoying one of its strongest-ever eras, but more a comment on how it has forgotten how to be fun. It’s more invested in the subtextual and significant, than the qualities that make people fall for the genre in the first place. Refreshingly, Gonjiam is a pure haunted house terror, and Jung Bum-Shik’s only concern is scaring his audience – sure, it’s superficial, but movies are allowed to be that, it’s not always a flaw.

A problem which so many found footage stories suffer from is the idea that someone has to be holding the camera at all times, and when their friends and colleagues are dying one by one, why are they still recording? Movies like Gonjiam and 2022’s Dead Stream circumvent that issue by introducing more cameras into proceedings, which may make those dark and dank corridors not quite as skin-crawling as they used to be, but it adds a shrewd new angle. They have their cake and eat it by having the ability to cut away to other things, swerving the issue of traditional found footage being planted in one location making momentum difficult to maintain, becoming dull, and Gonjiam is never that – even when it’s engaging in the (thankfully brief) obligatory character introductions. You could also take the opposite stance and think that the multi-camera stream is to the detriment of found footage, that it dilutes the core punkish appeal of found footage’s unedited, inescapable terror, but I prefer to see the good of this approach. The installation of what is effectively an in-movie director adds a unique wrinkle, one that could be discussed endlessly for what it represents in relation to the horror fan’s bloodlust.

Two segments are worth the price of admission, one being when Charlotte (Moon Ye-Won), runs away after shenanigans with a spooky doll in a laboratory (as anyone would), but the contents of the lab follow her, building to her effectively being “teleported” to the focal point of supernatural activity – room 402. Gonjiam turns a bog-standard, spooky possession scene into a sequence of excellent, insidious world-bending that lends an unescapable threat to the presence inside this building. The chase ends with a basic look-away, look-back sequence where one of her possessed friends gets closer and closer with each turn. This may be pedestrian as far as sequences of events go, but it becomes scary due to the quality of the acting, superior visuals, and a skin-crawling ratcheting of the tension amplified by valuable ambient sounds.

Cliches, in and of themselves, aren’t a negative thing, and when done well, they work.

The other segment also takes place inside the previously locked room 402, and is a bit more immediate (but no less spooky), requiring only some errant hands, impossible darkness, and a wandering presence that’s only visible through the camera’s infrared mode. Effectively only the operator with infared can see when a ghost is putting their hands within inches of colleagues faces who are blind in this pitch black room. It reminds of Remi Weekes pre-His House ‘Fright Bites’ short film for Channel 4, Tickle Monster, or the legendary climax to Silence of the Lambs. It’s again, a cliched set-up, but these only fail when the filmmaker rests on their laurels and doesn’t put in the proper effort, and I will not accuse Gonjiam of such half-arsed traits. If the movie is lacking anything, it’s making the characters stand out from one another in a meaningful way.

Second Sight recently released Elliot Goldner & Anton Immler’s horribly overlooked British found footage classic The Borderlands – a title that shares an awful lot with Gonjiam as they’re both nuts and bolts movies that do exactly what they set out to do – albeit incredibly well. It’s “all business” when the detestable ringleader gets what he deserves from the ghostly denizens he is milking for views. Whether it’s the spooky aura, numerous terrifying scenes, the flexibility it gives the rigid found footage format, or the haunting, deafening silence after a cathartic climax, Gonjiam tells a universally appreciable horror story that’s enjoyable for pretty much everyone within the genre’s parish – it’s just shocking that it’s not had a UK release before now (beyond film festival appearances).

The trope for home releases of movies from Japan, Korea or Hong Kong is that they lack video extras, with the offer being historical interviews and trailers. Second Sight aren’t ones to cave in to expectations. Two features stand out, the first is a visual essay by one of the voices and faces of the modern british horror scene, Zoe Rose Smith, who eloquently digs into the Fear of the Unknown. The most impressive extra is called the Sanctum of Horror, which reveals how revolutionary this movie was for its time – especially in Korea. For starters, Gonjiam is a real abandoned asylum and the crew converted an abandoned school to replicate that real asylum. As I watched the movie, I assumed that their was a degree of authenticity to their choice of location and they just fleshed out the mythology to amplify the horror to suit their goals – playing into the guerilla aesthetic of found footage. I am very happy to be wrong about that, as I am about the level of consideration they put into the overall production. They didn’t just follow convention – they looked for points of diversion, from the cameras used (largely GoPro’s) circumventing a consistent director of photography (found footage hasn’t really been a thing in the East as it has in the West) to the metholodogy of their ghosts movements. There’s a depth to Gonjiam that is hiding in plain sight. Good extras elevate a movie, and this disc is full of extra features that do just that at a canter.

So is Gonjiam Haunted Asylum the poster child for Korean Horror? I’m not sure I can be that conclusive, as this stuff is so obscure, and who knows what macabre delights are lurking in the shadows. If not this then the Wailing or Train to Busan (although, I’ve always felt the latter was more of a classical disaster movie that happened to have zombies in it). However, with Second Sight entering the fray and releasing movies from the peninsula, I have the optimism that we may actually see more of a light shone upon this under-served field of World Horror.

Rob’s Archive – Gonjiam Haunted Asylum