Remakes are a touchy subject within the horror community. While we’re all aware that some of the greatest scary movies of all time are based on existing films, with hits like The Thing and The Blob almost completely overshadowing their predecessors, there’s still an inevitable backlash whenever a new remake is announced.
Of course, the truth is that a movie’s overall quality depends more on who’s making it than whether or not it’s based on an existing idea, and that’s why I wasn’t so quick to judge when I heard that the popular found footage movie Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum was getting another re-imagining (the film has also been remade in Indonesia as Haunted Korean Hospital)in the form of Strange Frequencies: Taiwan Killer Hospital, that was quietly added to Netflix late last year.
A Philippine production set in Taiwan, writer-director Kerin Go’s latest film is less of a retread of Gonjiam’s localized thrills and more of an original found footage experience that just so happens to borrow elements from the South Korean original. In fact, Strange Frequencies isn’t a remake at all, with the film’s own characters referencing Gonjiam as a kick-ass horror film and the leader of the group even admitting that he got the idea for the team’s elaborate camera harnesses from Jung Bum-shik’s 2018 hit.
That’s why I think it’s worth comparing both of these pictures, as it says a lot about Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum that the feature is so well-suited for international remakes – especially when these productions turn out to be surprisingly entertaining homages with their own unique spin on the same premise.
The first major element that stands out when looking at these films is the fact that both productions are based on real abandoned hospitals that spawned countless urban legends over the years. In Gonjiam’s case, the real-life Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital had at one point been featured on a CNN list highlighting some of the most haunted locations in the world, with both urban explorers and government officials claiming that the place was rife with unusually aggressive paranormal activity. However, a little digging reveals that the hospital’s eerie reputation is based more on bad vibes than anything else, as there’s nothing about the institution’s history remotely resembling a horrific backstory.
In fact, the Hospital’s ultimate closure was the result of economic mishaps and concerns regarding plumbing/sewage issues, with this actually being one of the reasons why the filmmakers ultimately opted to recreate the location inside of an abandoned elementary school rather than shoot the entirety of the film on location.
On the other hand, Strange Frequencies’ Xinglin General Hospital has a much more disturbing backstory despite being much less famous. Once a bastion of Taiwan’s highly advanced public healthcare system, the hospital closed down in the early ’90s due to multiple reports of medical malpractice, including wrongful deaths, and years of budgetary fraud. Since then, locals began telling stories about ghostly patients and orderlies who still roam the building’s decayed halls. Xinglin was also the setting of another horror movie back in 2020, appropriately titled Hospital.
Despite not being quite as famous as Gonjiam Psychiatric, Xinglin’s sordid history is much more well-documented, with claims of murdered patients seeming more plausible under the sleazy hands of a corrupt administration.
Beyond the settings, both films also share the same premise of having an exaggerated group of internet celebrities attempt to stay the night at these haunted locations before their own hubris leads to their doom. However, each movie goes about criticizing these characters in a different way. Strange Frequencies approaches the idea through a more meta lens, with some of the victims here being real actors and film producers risking it all in order to further their careers in an industry that has come to value likes and followers more than genuine talent.
There are still plenty of jabs at influencer culture and online engagement farming despite the sensitive nature of the hospital’s gruesome history, but it’s clear that what the movie really wants us to question is why we’re so entertained by the exploitation of a morbid past in the first place.
This also leads to a completely different ending this time around, with director Kerwin Go reworking certain story-beats from Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum in order to question if building cinematic success over a foundation of human suffering is worth the results.
It’s also interesting to note that, while the backstory of each haunting is remarkably different (with the original film presenting us with a ping-pong-obsessed hospital director who went mad and Strange Frequencies suggesting that otherworldly entities were involved in Xinglin’s collective downfall), both films focus more on the consequences of our main character’s actions than any master plan by the supernatural antagonists.
That being said, the very end of Taiwan Killer Hospital suggests that the success of the livestream may not have been natural, though I won’t get into details in order to avoid spoilers if you’ve yet to see the film.
At the end of the day, I’m more comfortable referring to Strange Frequencies: Taiwan Killer Hospital as a spiritual successor to Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum rather than a remake or even a pseudo-sequel. Both films share enough of the same base DNA to obviously be related, and they both borrow heavily from the cult favorite Grave Encounters, but there are so many creative differences in both story and presentation that the movies end up feeling like completely unique dishes based on the same ingredients.
While I still think Gonjiam is the superior film due to Jung Bum-shik’s incomparable eye for scares, both films are worth watching for completely different reasons.
If you really think about it, there are (allegedly) haunted hospitals in almost every single country in the world, each with their own unique histories and plenty of potential for ghostly scares. That’s why I wouldn’t mind seeing even more international “remakes” of Gonjiam so long as they’re as creative as this one and manage to include some local flavor into the mix.