One Way Ticket: Ghost Train (2026) Review

Director: Tak Se-woong

Notable Cast: Joo Hyun-young, Jeon Bae-soo, Choi Bo-min, Kim Ji-in, Kim Woo-kyum, Jung Han-bit, Kim Na-yeon, Lim Cheol-soo, Hyun Bong-sik

 

When it comes to a horror anthology, it’s always a joy to see how the creative team can conjure a structure, balance the stories, and make it all pay off. If you get it right, find the tone and keep up the pace, even if one or two of the smaller stories don’t hit fully, the whole retains its strengths.

For Ghost Train, director Tak Se-woong goes all in on the urban myth of a haunted train station, delivering a handful of great ghost stories and a surprisingly solid wraparound that presents each tale in a shockingly fun, modern way. If anything, the film often comes off as less of an anthology, particularly in the latter half, and it plays with expectations in fun ways that deliver jump scares without ever pulling away from the character piece and themes at its core. Needless to say, Ghost Train is a spooky, conceptually fun way to kick off 2026 in horror. 

 

Being in the content creation industry for a larger company is not always easy, and for Da-kyung, played by Joo Hyun-young, her horror YouTube channel is in danger of being drowned out by all the beauty tip channels. However, her latest series, which is based on the hauntings around a particular train station, has caught the eye of a young producer at her company. She schedules an interview with one of the station's workers, an older gentleman who should have plenty of stories, and as he shares each, she finds herself delving deeper into the realm of the supernatural. 

 

Intriguingly, while the structure of an anthology horror film is essential for hooking its audience, Ghost Train really toys with its structure. The first half is a full-on anthology, dropping three ghostly tales within the first 45 minutes. Each tale is a slightly spun version of a ghost story classic (the tale of a suicidal ghost, a disfigured young woman looking for a pretty face to ‘steal’, and one where a homeless man finds surprising good luck from a mysterious soda pop machine), and each one features some fantastic use of tension, atmosphere, and jump scares. While none of them could perhaps fill out an entire film on their own, although the final soda pop machine segment certainly could have been a Twilight Zone episode, they work together to develop a tone for the film as a whole that really highlights some fun material, and horror anthology nerds will love it. 

 

However, Ghost Train then takes an almost entirely different track for its second half. While the young YouTuber Da-kyung is introduced as the audience surrogate, her role as a listener becomes a full-fledged protagonist. Not just in the sense that the wraparound becomes another story, but also in the way the film moves towards a more traditional narrative where Da-kyung ends up investigating the haunted train station. This starts to involve other characters outside of the initial run of stories, and more horror ensues.  A rival YouTuber gets involved, resulting in some very intense body horror, her blooming romance with a young producer gets entangled in the intensity of her obsession with the story, and there’s a handful of twists at the end that certainly play into the overall themes around people who dig too deep to find the horrors of the supernatural world. There’s plenty of solid performances to be had, particularly from Jeon Bae-soo as the station manager she is interviewing, and it all leads to a finale that embraces the surrealism to its fullest. 

 

Ghost Train is not your usual horror anthology. It’s not just a series of vignettes sliced together with a haphazard wrap-around. It is very much a narrative horror film that features individual ghost stories, mostly in the opening half. Truthfully, it’s better than expected for this reason, allowing some of its characters more time to develop. The plot plays with the expectations of an anthology, but it’s a far more cohesive whole in terms of tone, atmosphere, and scares than most anthologies are. For that, it gets a strong recommendation even if it tends ot fall into some of its own tropes. 

 

Written By Matt Malpica Reifschneider