28/34
The crew of a horror web series travels to an abandoned asylum for a live-action broadcast. They soon encounter a lot 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 a real hospital, so the scenes in Gonjiam were actually filmed at the National Naval High School in Busan, where the production team strictly followed the hospital’s floor plan to recreate the exact exterior and hallways. Charlotte keeps looking to the side when the group is in front of the hospital. She’s clearly reacting because she’s smiling at whatever it is. Literature Homecoming Haunted Hill (2007). I’m usually critical of found footage horror because it’s usually unnecessary and doesn’t add anything to the story. Usually, found footage films would be better than a “regular” film. This is not the case with Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum. With the new cutting edge technology and the reason the actors know how to work the camera, it serves this film’s purpose perfectly. There is little camera shake and other “effects” that you would usually see in found footage, which in my opinion ruins the film. The story itself is pretty standard, 7 young “ghost hunters” get into an old insane asylum, mostly for the sake of ratings and profit, which makes it more realistic than other similar films. The pace of the film is pretty slow and nothing really happens in the first half, but it’s worth it! I was originally going to give it a 6, but I mean, it’s a horror film and one of the scariest. It’s a subgenre I’ve ever seen, so I bumped it up to a 7. If you want a scary film without too much plot, this is the film for you.