Macabre...ish Horror Review: Warning: Do Not Play

Warning: Do Not Play, 2019/ 1 hr 26 min

This is a Korean found footage film about an aspiring director, Mi-Jung Park who is struggling to get film ideas. And when she hears from a friend about a movie so terrifying that people fled the theatre and one died from a heart attack, she’s intrigued. The student, film major from Daejeon University, who made the film, when questioned, said the movie was shot by a ghost.

So she heads to the school to inquire and hopefully find out who made the film. She finds some students that are serious horror trivia fans and gets from them that there is an abandoned theatre where a girl named Soon-Mi was filming a movie and burned to death but continued filming, even though she was a ghost.

After that, another young director came to the same location and the ghost appeared and killed the crew and asked the director what kind of movie he wanted to make, he said, the scariest movie in the world. So the ghost knocked him out and made the movie. That film was called Warning. Well, that’s the rumor anyway.

There was a film with that name accepted into a film festival but Mi-Jung was told the screening was cancelled. She gets a clip of it and searches for the director, Kim Jae Hyun for a meeting. He is not what she was expecting and the meeting does not go as planned. Not to be deterred, she follows him home, to his haunted house...the old abandoned theatre and she finds movie. And he finds her.

After that ordeal, Mi-jung immediately starts having terrible nightmares and experiencing weird/creepy moments and entities in her apartment.

The effects are pretty good and some of the cinematography effects and edits were really great! I’ve never seen a POV horror quite like this before. The movie does get creepy but it’s mostly build up to a very nice ending. Most of the blood and gore is toward the end and there are strong The Ring vibes here. Also it’s in Korea with English subtitles.

Trigger warning: cutting, assault, suicide