The Korean horror film GUIMOON: The Lightless Door from director Sim Deokgeun won the People’s Choice Overall Feature Film Award last month from this year’s 25th Vancouver Asian Film Festival (VAFF). Also on the awards list was filmmaker Hwang Donghyuk, who picked up the Most Impactful TV Series prize for his Netflix smash Squid Game.

The film stars Kim Kangwoo (The Taste of Money, 2012) as a paranormal investigator who returns to a former training center where his exorcist mother died years earlier while performing a ritual. Over the years, the mysterious building has also claimed the lives of several other people, including a janitor who went on a murderous rampage and other individuals who died of suicide or in unexplained accidents. Kim’s co-star is Kim Sohye of Moonlit Winter (2019), who plays a university student who heads to the same center with two other friends to film a video for a contest.

The debut feature of director Sim, GUIMOON: The Lightless Door, opened in theaters in late August and welcomed close to 100,000 viewers during its domestic release. The film was notable for being the first Korean production to be filmed simultaneously for the ScreenX and 4DX exhibition formats, as well as traditional 2D projection.

The Vancouver Asian Film Festival is the longest-running celebration of Asian cinema in Canada.