32/12
A horror web series crew travels to an abandoned facility for a live broadcast. They soon encounter much more than they bargained for as they move deeper into the nightmarish old building. The filmmakers couldn’t get permission from the South Korean government to film in an actual hospital, so the scenes in the film set in Gonjiam were actually filmed at the National Naval High School in Busan, with the production team meticulously following the hospital’s floor plan to recreate the exact same exterior and hallways. Charlotte looks away when the group is outside the hospital. She’s clearly responding as she smiles at whoever it is. References Return to the House on Haunted Hill (2007). I’m usually critical of found-footage horror, as it’s usually unnecessary and doesn’t add anything to the story. Usually, found footage films would be better as a "regular" film. That’s not the case with Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum. With new cutting-edge technology and the reason the actors know how to work the camera, it serves the purpose of this film admirably. There’s a bit of shaky-cam and other «effects» that you’d usually see in found footage, which in my opinion ruins the movie. The story itself is pretty standard, 7 young «ghost hunters» enter an old madhouse, mostly for the sake of reviews and money, which makes it more realistic than other similar movies. The pace of the movie is pretty slow and nothing really happens in the first half, but it was worth it! I was originally going to give this a 6, but since this is a horror movie and one of the scariest subgenres I’ve ever seen, I’ve bumped it up to a 7. If you want a scary movie without too much plot, this is the movie for you.