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| A Still from Korean horror film "Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum" / Courtesy of Showbox |
By Park Jin-hai
The low-budget Korean horror film "Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum" is poised to win big.
The fake documentary horror film, casting rookie actors to tell the story of seven young people teaming up to visit an abandoned psychiatric hospital, became a surprise No.1 hit at the local box office this weekend, attracting nearly 1 million moviegoers.
That is the quickest to reach the 1 million mark among local horror films in the past 10 years.
Gonjiam is the name of a countryside town in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province, where the closed psychiatric institution Namyang Mental Hospital is located. Renowned in real life among ghost hunters and other thrill-seekers, the place was selected by CNN as one of the seven "freakiest places on the planet."
The film was downplayed at the time of its release, because it opened on the same day as Steven Spielberg's sci-fi fantasy "Ready Player One" and big-name Korean thriller "Seven Years of Night."
But thanks to word of mouth among horror fans, it remained in the top spot for the past five days, drawing 1.3 million in its opening week, the highest performance ever achieved by a Korean film released in March. The previous record was the 2017 crime action thriller "The Prison" which attracted 1.24 million viewers in its opening week.
The local movie industry is on the upbeat, thinking it might beat the records of Hollywood-made horror films. In terms of opening week performance alone, "Gonjiam" beat James Wan's "The Conjuring," which passed the 1 million mark nine days after it was released. "The Conjuring," the biggest ticket-seller among horror films released in Korea, sold 2.26 million tickets. David Sandberg's supernatural horror film "Lights Out" attracted 2.14 million viewers last year.
Director Jung Bum-shik, whose previous works include the 2007 horror movie "Epitaph," says his film is of the "experience-horror" genre. To increases audiences' immersive feeling, it takes the form of a YouTube livestreaming show. Ninety percent of the movie has been shot by the actors themselves, who used action cameras and body cameras in exploring the mysterious space. Unlike other horror films, it eliminated background music and sound effects, using the real ambience of the place.
"The young generation enjoys content on their smartphones. On YouTube broadcasts, we skip the long storytelling or long narratives. In order to focus on the experimental elements, we recreated our movie set as close as to the abandoned bleak hospital and minimized the sound effects," the director said during a recent meeting with his movie fans.
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