[Film Review] FrightFest: The Ghost Station (2023)

Based on the legendary Korean webtoon Oksu Station Ghost by author Horang, Jeong Yong-ki’s The Ghost Station made its UK premiere at FrightFest to a crowd keen for some fresh and terrifying Asian horror.  The film follows Kim Na-yeong (Kim Bo-ra), a journalist struggling to craft quality stories for a clickbait-infested gossip site. Upon hearing from friend Choi Woo-won (Kim Jae Hyun) about a string of supposed suicides connected to Oksu subway station, Na-yeong begins to pull at a thread that unravels a mystery far more insidious than initially expected.

Unfortunately, The Ghost Station plays its hand far too early, opening on its scariest scene, before plummeting into a profoundly average ghost story that never again manages to capture that same promising, contorted high. As Na-yeong and Woo-won discover the history behind the station and the curse surrounding it, The Ghost Station brings little originality to the table, pulling plot points and details directly from scarier, superior horrors – which isn’t necessarily a sin, but if you’re going to do it, you need to do it well.

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Korean horror has long made a name for itself thanks to a well-deserved reputation for originality and risk-taking, however The Ghost Station feels like an attempt to recreate a distinctly American style of jumpscare-based horror. The tension and terror so synonymous that draws many to Korean horror (often as a tonic to combat the boredom of aforementioned US horror) is completely lacking, and while the derivative nature of the narrative might pull from the J-horror glory days of yore, it fails to bring anything new to the ‘viral curse’ subgenre perfected by The Ring or even One Missed Call. 

It’s interesting (and disappointing) then to learn that The Ghost Station was adapted for screen by Japanese horror master Kōji Shiraishi (Noroi, Occult, Cult), usually famed for his outlandish and fantastical stories that scale new levels of bonkers. A bigger let down still is that screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi, writer of the aforementioned The Ring, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Serpent’s Path and Hideo Nakata’s Don’t Look Up, also had a hand in crafting The Ghost Station. With such a reputable crew behind the camera, genuinely creepy source material and a talented cast, it’s hard to see how The Ghost Station could have gone so wrong. But go wrong it does, and a majority of the runtime follows a consistent pattern of exposition dump-jumpscare-rinse-repeat, before leading to a bizarre ending confrontation that’s more girlboss than ghostly.

However, The Ghost Station isn’t entirely without its charms, and a couple of set pieces manage to generate shivers – alongside the previously mentioned opening being one, another particularly creepy scenes makes use of an iPhone camera’s autofocus feature in a neat little evolution of the technophobia so prevalent through The Ghost Station’s J-horror influences. Unfortunately, these two moments fail to hold up the bloat and boredom of the rest of the film, and although it’s an admirable attempt at regaining the audience’s attention, unfortunately that train has long left the station.

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