Forget Joker Folie à Deux: 5 Bone-Chilling Horror Movies About Asylums
It is never a good idea to visit an abandoned hospital.
Asylums are a favorite setting for horror filmmakers. After all, legends abound around these buildings, from stories of psychopathic doctors to tales of the ghosts of serial killers trapped within the walls.
1. Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, 2018
The abandoned asylum of Gonjiam has a bad reputation. People have disappeared there, horrible experiments have been conducted, and even mass suicides have occurred.
But that does not stop a popular blogger from gathering a team and exploring the building. He desperately wants to get into room 402, which is rumored to contain the most important secrets of Gonjiam.
2. Hellbound: Hellraiser 2, 1988
One of the characters of the first movie, Kirsty, survives the house massacre orchestrated by the Cenobites. The woman is taken to a mental hospital where she is haunted by visions.
The only one who believes Kirsty is Dr. Channard. He resurrects her stepmother, giving the monsters a new chance to inflict violence on ordinary people. But Kirsty is not ready to give up: she will fight the servants of Hell, led by Pinhead.
The change of location does not change the essence of the franchise at all: the sequel still has plenty of latex suits, scary makeup and grotesque decorations of hell.
3. Grave Encounters, 2011
TV producer Jerry talks about the show Grave Encounters, whose hosts entered paranormal places and tried to contact spirits. At the same time, the man shows archival footage of the cursed episode when everything went wrong.
The creator of the show, Lance, along with his team, locks himself in an abandoned mental hospital for a day. All movements and actions are recorded by the TV crew with handheld cameras. At first, the Grave Encounters do not believe in ghosts, but the more time they spend in the hospital, the more obvious it becomes: someone is here.
4. Gothika, 2003
Psychiatrist Miranda works in a clinic that treats female criminals. One evening, the woman almost runs over a woman and soon loses consciousness. A few days later, Miranda wakes up in a psychiatric hospital and learns terrible news: after the accident, she returned home and killed her husband.
Now she has to prove that she did not commit a brutal crime. She has no recollection of the events of that fateful day, but ghosts are most likely involved in the case.
5. Unsane, 2018
Sawyer Valentini leaves her hometown after an unpleasant experience of stalking. But by the will of fate, she is forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital. She is sure that the hospitalization is somehow connected to the figure of an obsessive admirer. That is why Sawyer wants to leave the dark place at all costs.
Steven Soderbergh's paranoid thriller makes you doubt everything that happens on screen: at first we sympathize with Sawyer and believe her interpretation of events – but gradually we begin to doubt the woman's view of the world.
The director conveys a sense of claustrophobia and panic by shooting on an iPhone: thanks to an unusual creative solution, the frame seems more closed, which creates additional anxiety.