I like to think I have a pretty good handle on my tastes in scary movies. I definitely have a type, and I definitely have things I tend to avoid. But every now and then something will surprise me. And I’m starting to think that maybe I need to revise my stance on found-footage horror films shot in abandoned hospitals. Sure, a lot of found-footage films are hackneyed trash, and too many horror films set in abandoned hospitals seem to think that the setting should do all of the heavy lifting. But I took a chance on Grave Encounters, and it was a pleasant surprise, demonstrating to me the value of keeping my mind open.
And I’m glad I did, because it lead me to take a chance on Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, which is another found-footage film shot in an abandoned hospital (well, sort of - more on that in a bit). And like Grave Encounters, it’s actually pretty good. It does fall victim to a couple of found-footage clichés, and I get the feeling the translation of the dialogue isn’t as good as it could be, but once it picks up steam it’s easy to look past these shortcomings. It’s a well-paced haunted-house story that doesn’t get in its own way and tightens the screws to striking effect.
The film starts off with a phone-camera prologue of two kids trying to open a locked door in the hospital and mysteriously disappearing, but this is really just to set up our protagonists, who run a YouTube channel called Horror Time. It’s sort of a paranormal investigation channel, run by Ha-Joon, and his partners, dependable Sung-Hoon and Seung-Wook, and bumbling, hapless Je-Yoon. They’re planning an expedition of Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital (which is a real place, and supposedly one of the most haunted sites in Korea, though the film wasn’t actually shot there. The government wouldn’t give them access, so they subbed in an abandoned high school in a different town). Even better, they’re going to livestream it - a first for their channel. Ha-Joon recruits three young women to come along - Ji-Hyun will do some additional camera and tech work, Charlotte’s visiting from the U.S. with her dance crew (and brags about having visited three other sites on CNN’s list of freakiest places in the world, which is an actual thing) and Ah-Yeon is a shy, naïve nursing student to whom Je-Yoon takes an almost instant dislike for reasons that are never really made clear. The six of them, then, dub themselves the Horror Time Terror Squad, and it’s just as corny as it sounds.
The whole film starts off a little corny, really, with the six of them trading stories about all of the stuff that supposedly happened at the hospital, and it’s all kind of over the top. Supposedly all kinds of horrible torture and strange experiments happened there, it might have been built on a secret wartime grave to hide its existence, and supposedly the hospital director hung herself in the shower room. Just absolutely stock “hospital with a dark past” stuff, though it’s hard to tell how much of it is diegetically true and how much is the crew hyping it up for the people they’ve brought in and for the sake of clicks. They lay out a plan to sneak into the hospital grounds under the cover of night, and the Horror Time Terror Squad are nothing if not a very modern take on the found-footage protagonist. Their exploration will be livestreamed (or so they say) via YouTube, and everyone will have GoPro cameras strapped to them, which allow them to capture both their point of view and their own faces. This is in addition to the various surveillance cameras that Sung-Hoon and Seung-Wook will have installed in different hot spots around the hospital, in an initial foray before they all head in together. Ha-Joon will then stay behind at base camp, monitoring their viewership…and switching from feed to feed in real time, which enables him to add in some post-production freeze-frames and replays, and gives Sung-Hoon and Seung-Wook, unbeknownst to the others, time to set up some fake scares in order to spice up the proceedings.
This is something I’ve noticed in a lot of the found-footage stuff I have ended up watching for this thing - to one degree or another, they deal with the divide between reality and artifice.
Butterfly Kisses is probably the most obvious about it (to its detriment), but
Hell House LLC is about a group of people who devise haunted houses for a living, and Grave Encounters is about a similar paranormal investigation show, whose creators are equally comfortable with fabricating scares. The less said about
The Houses October Built, the better, because it was garbage. But in each case, you have a group of people who are in the process of fabricating an experience (with some degree of assumption that
of course the supernatural isn’t real) only to have it get away from them.
And boy howdy, does it ever get away from the Horror Time Terror Squad.
The first half of the film is largely table-setting - getting everyone together, some wacky hijinks as they travel to the hospital, setting up cameras around the hospital, stuff like that. But once it gets rolling, the back half is pretty intense throughout - this film does a good job of slowly and gradually ramping things up, starting with little things that seem strange or off (and are faked, for all we know), and escalating and escalating until the last fourth of the film is just non-stop tension. It takes a little while to get there, but I think it’s to the good. When the other “we didn’t plan this part” shoe drops, the film just goes for it. And to its credit, the setting does do a lot of work in terms of establishing a mood. It’s an honest-to-goodness urban ruin, grimy and shitty and full of wreckage, no lighting except what the crew has, and so even before anything goes amiss, there’ a lot of people cutting just the thinnest slice out of the darkness that surrounds and threatens to overwhelm them. We can’t see what’s waiting for them in the dark, but it’s hard not to feel like it’s just…right…there.
On paper, the story isn’t anything especially new - a bunch of teens go into a haunted building and try to gin up some scares for publicity and end up getting far more than they bargained for - but a couple of things set this film apart from its nearest found-footage cousins. First, the use of GoPros for the majority of the footage gives the film an even more claustrophobic feel than the usual limited perspective of found-footage films. We spend a lot of time in close-up on people’s faces under different conditions, and the combination of focus on their facial expressions and inability to see what’s going on around them lends everything a real immediacy. You don’t really realize just how intense it is to just look at someone’s face in close-up for extended lengths of time until you have to - it’s almost like someone decided to make a film that was approximately 65% Heather’s tearful confession scene from
The Blair Witch Project, one of the most iconic sequences in modern horror film. And when shit really pops off, the sudden shifts from one close-up to another and the lack of visual information beyond their immediate personal space makes for some of the most effective moments in the film. When something is present in the room with them, you often don’t know until it’s much too late, and it’s startling without it being a cheap jump scare. It really is just evil shit materializing from out of the darkness, and it works.
Second, the filmmakers do a good job of not overexplaining or mythologizing. This film’s nearest comparison is probably Grave Encounters, in terms of not just the premise and location, but even some of the routes it takes through the narrative. I don’t think one plagiarizes the other, I just think that if you’re telling a story about a haunted psychiatric hospital, there are some places the story will tend to naturally go. But Grave Encounters, as solid as it was, had as one of its biggest weaknesses the tendency to explain too much, to overmythologize, and this film doesn’t. It alludes to some stuff at the beginning, and establishes a few setpieces along the way, but doesn’t worry overmuch about making it all make sense, because it wouldn't make sense. Weird, horrible shit happens to the people in this film, and neither they nor we are provided a neat and tidy history that explains why it’s happening. There’s no mythology, there’s no exposition, it’s just happening, and you won’t be alive much longer anyway. Its use of effects is also less artificial and more restrained than similar films (no ghosts with weirdly elongated face here), so the experience is less “this is a fancy digital effect” and more “oh shit.”
It’s also not afraid to take its time with a given scene. There are a couple of points where something bad happens, but instead of it being a sudden, sharp reveal and smash cut to something else, it draws it out, really lets the tension and the weirdness sink in, and I’ve been missing that in films like this. This film makes moving your hand far enough to turn a doorknob into an agonizingly long, life-or-death process, and it’s great. Finally, at no point did I really feel the artificiality of the found-footage conceit. There’s a narrative reason for things like freeze-frames and replays (and even a tiny bit of music) since Ha-Joon is, contrary to the purported live nature of the expedition, managing and curating the feed on the fly. And by the end, there’s even some suggestion that we aren’t always seeing footage they captured, which isn’t explored as much as it could be, but it’s nicely chilling. The GoPros mean that we don’t really have to ask why someone’s still holding a camera while they’re running for their life, because the cameras are winched on - they’re with them at all times. It largely makes narrative sense, and so I didn’t really find myself being yanked out of the experience, as is so often the case for me with found-footage films.
There are some problems. It does run afoul of the “we have to keep filming” cliché to a certain degree- Ha-Joon is obviously invested in capturing a large audience, and a certain amount of denial in the face of the unexplainable is understandable, but he kind of goes from aspiring Internet celebrity to obsessed monomaniac a little too quickly for plausibility, and there are some points in the film where it’s too dark or the camerawork too shaky (or both) for us to really get a handle on what’s supposed to be scaring us at points. It’s sort of ironic, but the commitment to verisimilitude (of course the camerawork and lighting won’t be perfect) sometimes detracts a little from the overall effect. And as I said up front, the translation to English isn’t always great, and so some of the characters may end up being painted with a broader brush than would otherwise be the case. But none of these were major distractions for me. Once things start to escalate, it’s a pretty damn scary ride to the finish, and I really really hope nobody ever makes a sequel to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment