Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum Review

Synopsis In South Korea there are 7 super-haunted locations, and Gonjiam the abandoned asylum is one of them. This movie follows a team of ghost hunting live streamers as they attempt the biggest stream of their lives. Picking up 3 female volunteers and one bro volunteer, the Horror Time crew breaks into the haunted asylum and begin streaming it to the world. But things do not go as planned for the jaded paranormal investigators, and they are quickly in over their heads as real occurrences present themselves. You could even say they are experiencing some sort of incident in a ghostland. Review of Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum This is my second viewing of Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum. I first heard of this movie from our facebook group a while back and checked it out with zero expectations and was pleasantly surprised. For a movie I had never heard of before, it was actually pretty fun to watch. Coming back to the film about a year later I am able to see some of the flaws a little clearer. Mikayla mentioned that found footage is hard for her because the camera motion makes her feel nauseous. Well that really becomes a problem for this movie as there are like 20 moving cameras switching back and forth. Each character is equipped with a go pro looking directly at their face, a pov cam, and some of the crew even have handheld cameras just to bump that multicam number up. One of the dudes has a wide fisheye camera that is so confusing to look at that you literally can’t even tell what’s going on when they cut to it. It also takes about half the movie’s runtime for anything scary to really happen. With those negatives out of the way, I think this movie provides some seriously scary scenes, creepy atmosphere, and visuals that will stick with me for a long time. I still like this movie, it just isn’t quite as good as I remember it being. If you like found footage style horror and foreign films it’s worth a watch in my opinion.  Score 6/10