Overview
The 2018 South Korean horror film, Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum was directed by Jung Bum-shik. This movie was based on the real psychiatric hospital of the same name. The movie follows a horror website crew that wanted to investigate the asylum after it was abandoned. They had heard tales of the hauntings here and they wanted to gain fame and clout by doing some investigating themselves. What they didn’t realize was just how horrific their encounters here would be. Let’s find out more about the movie and the real Gonjiam haunted asylum.
The Gonjiam Movie (Spoilers)
During the Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum film, two boys decide to go explore the Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital. They had heard rumors that hundreds of people were killed here and patients had gone missing. The director of the hospital was rumored to have been killed here as well. The two of them knew that the most paranormal activity was coming from Room 402, which was the intensive care unit. As they filmed their mission, they caught a look of a very ghostly face. Shortly after, they disappeared. This is what made Ha-Joon, a YouTuber, want to go into the building and try to find out what happened to them.
Ha-Joon decides to get a crew of people together who also want to know more about the asylum. Ha-Joon’s YouTube channel is called “Horror Times” and he just knows that going to the asylum will boost viewers and soon he will become famous. However, what he has in mind isn’t exactly what he gets.
After getting his crew together, Ha-Joon is ready to begin his live broadcast at the asylum. He decides that he will stay at base camp while the others go inside and broadcast everything that they see inside the psychiatric hospital. Shortly after they go inside, it comes out that there is a script for what they will do and say when they enter the asylum. They have put together some ghost-hunting antics that they feel their fans will really love.
Even though there is a script to their live broadcast, it seems as if the spirits in the asylum have something planned of their own. The group finds strange coffins in the building and when one of the women puts her hand in a hole, she pulls it out and finds that she has been wounded horribly. This disturbs a few others in the group and they decide that this is not what they had in mind. They feel that it is time to leave.
During the film, each member sees paranormal and unexplainable events. They are attacked by these strange forces and eventually, the infra-red cameras pick up a dark presence in Room 402. As Ha-Joon is watching his team go underwater in the room, with no escape, he sees that the YouTube channel has gotten almost a million views. He goes to check this out and he ends up getting strangled to death by the ghost of the director of the asylum.
One last member of the crew is left, Seung-Wook and he eventually admits that the entire investigation was supposed to be scripted. The live stream cuts off shortly after he admits to this and as the movie ends, the dish of holy water begins to boil.
Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum Trailer
The Real Haunted Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital
When this film was released, there was a lot of talk that the asylum never existed and that it was just an urban legend. However, others shared their own stories of being in the asylum. The Gonjiam asylum was built near Seoul, Korea in 1961. It had three floors where it served hundreds of patients. In 1996, the owner and director of the asylum died and the asylum closed. The building was never passed on to anyone else and there was no interest in reopening it. The building began to fall apart and it was finally demolished in 2018.
The legends of Gonjiam asylum have spread all over Korea and the world. Much like other asylums, spooky tales have come out about just how horrible this place was after it closed. Asylums are known for the cruel ways that they treated patients and this is why most of them closed down. In this asylum, the legends are that hundreds of patients died with no explanation. The cruel ways that the doctors treated the patients here were just part of how they lost their lives.
Not only were there plenty of unexplained deaths in the asylum but there were also suicides added to the list. Many employees took their own lives due to the paranormal encounters that happened to them in the asylum. The paranormal activity in the asylum has been reported by paranormal investigators. Let’s find out more about the haunts.
The Ghosts In the Gonjiam Asylum
There have been a lot of rumors about the ghosts that haunt the asylum. There have been paranormal investigators who made claims that after their time in the abandoned asylum, they felt that it was one of the most terrifying locations that they had ever been in. This creepy asylum may have been the end of many lives, but the legends of how haunted it is continue to spread.
The madness of the asylum is rumored to be one of the main reasons that those who worked here wanted to get out. There were rumors that they were haunted by the ghosts of the patients who died there. Now that the asylum has been torn down, the legends will continue to spread, but no one will ever know what happened there. The movie about the asylum was one way to get the rumors swirling yet again.
Most asylums around the world all have a few things in common. There are always stories about just how horrible the conditions were in them and how people were tortured there. The tales and legends of the Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital seem to be all that there is left for us now.