Original title: Gon-ji-am

South Korean found footage horror turns out, slightly disappointingly, to be very similar to found footage horror from just about anywhere else. Jung Bum-shik’s Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum has moments that are creepier than most, including some very effective shock moments, but it’s difficult to escape the fact that it’s largely an unacknowledged remake of the Canadian Grave Encounters (2011).

When two live video streamers disappear after seemingly encountering a ghost while exploring the abandoned Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital, a real-life facility regarded by some as one of the creepiest places on Earth, Ha-joon (Wi Ha-joon), owner of YouTube channel Horror Times, decides to explore the building and find out what happened to them. He gathers a team of fellow filmmakers including Ah-yeon (Oh Ah-yeon), Charlotte (Moon Ye-won), Ji-hyun (Park Ji-hyun), Sung-hoon (Park Sung-hoon), Seung-wook (Lee Seung-wook), and Je-yoon (Yoo Je-yoon) and sets up for what could be a record-breaking live broadcast. Ha-joon stays at base camp, overseeing technical operations while the rest enter the building, streaming from body-mounted cameras. Rumour has it that the hospital’s director murdered all of his patients before disappearing and start their investigations in the intensive care centre, Room 402. Much strangeness occurs, including shots of the six explorers that suggest the presence of a seventh person recording them. It all, inevitably, ends in tragedy.

For all its derivative nature, Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum is a more than passable canter through some very familiar territory. There’s very little here that the committed found footage follower won’t have seen many times before (the abandoned asylum/hospital seems to have been second only to the deep woods as the most popular location for such things) but Jung brings a level of intensity to the proceedings that far outranks most of its predecessors. It works in the way that all good found footage works, priming us to expect things to appear in frame where and when they shouldn’t, using long, music-free takes to generate considerable suspense. The script, by Jung and Park Sang-min, briefly flirts with the idea that Ha-Joon and his co-conspirators are staging the whole thing to get genuine reactions from their hired crew, particularly the women among them only for real and deadly paranormal forces to step in.

That same script takes aim at the vacuity of online streaming culture, at the aching desire for validation and attention that only high numbers of viewer hits seems to be able to soothe. Having admitted that he originally intended the broadcast to be entirely scripted, Ha-joon’s broadcast starts to shed viewers, those that remain merely doing so to taunt the filmmakers and mock their efforts. The ghosts, led by the sadistic spirit of the asylum director (Park Ji-a), are on to his neediness and fake an ever rising viewer count, nudging him ever closer to the 1 million viewers he craves even as his production team are dying all around him. Attention is far more important than human life in this strange online world, one far weirder and more frightening than any haunted asylum.

This vaguely satirical edge, the intensity of the mounting panic and air of dread and the committed performances give Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum the edge and it’s certainly better than the otherwise remarkably similar Grave Encounters, a film that ends up more tedious than frightening. The characters here are (marginally) less annoying and the scares are more effective but is that really enough? It’s the sort of film that lends ammunition to those who despise found footage as a format, but for everyone else, it seemed to strike a chord. On its release in March 2018, it topped the Korean box office chart and went on to take the second highest box office haul of any Korean horror film after Kim Jee-woon’s masterly Janghwa, Hongryeon/A Tale of Two Sisters (2003). And in truth, it is in the upper echelons of the overcrowded found footage market, a derivative but highly enjoyable and in the end nerve-janglingly creepy film – and yes, in the end, that probably is enough.

For some, it was too much. The producers had been refused permission to film in the actual Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province and were forced instead to shoot the film in the National Maritime High School in Busan. Despite this, Jung managed to recreate the look and layout of Gonjiam so well that the owner of the real long-abandoned building sued the producers, trying to keep the film out of cinemas because he was trying to sell the building at the time and believed that the film would negatively impact on the potential sale of the building. The case was thrown out of court.