"KPop Demon Hunters": review

Found here. L to R: half-demonic Rumi (don't think too hard about the shape of her hair), US-raised Zoey, and temperamental Mira. Big eyes with small irises to suggest intense excitement or enthusiasm are a common trope in manga, manhwa, and animé. More normal looks here.

[WARNING: spoilers.]

I admit I was wrong. I had initially sneered at the thought of ever watching "KPop Demon Hunters," a 2025 Netflix animated action-musical-comedy directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, starring the voice talents of Arden Cho, Ahn Hyo-seop, May Hong, Ji-young Yoo, Yunjin Kim, Daniel Dae Kim, Ken Jeong, and Lee Byung-hun. Even though this movie is listed as an American production, with dialogue that's 95% English, it's saturated with Korean culture, especially in terms of its visuals (which include a lot of written Korean in the background) and the cultural tropes recognizable to any modern Korean. I'm still not a fan of K-Pop (or KPop, as the movie title writes it, but Google AI suggests that K-Pop or K-pop, with the hyphen, is the more common form), but the music makes sense for the story being told; plus, the movie as a whole has a heart and is, at times, even touching. If you can get through the high-pitched music, the flash-bang animation, and the noisy superficiality of K-Pop fandom and culture, you may actually find a heartwarming message about friendship, love, and truth at this story's core. The movie is also a treasure trove for lore-savvy people (folklore, mythology, demonology, etc.), but I have to wonder how lore-accurate it is.

An opening voiceover narration sets the stage, telling us that, for many years, successive groups of three warrior women have kept the soul-stealing demons of the hell-realm from taking over the mortal realm where we normies live. The latest group of young girls—Rumi (Cho), Zoey (Yoo), and Mira (Hong)—have been raised by Celine (Kim Yunjin), who was initially the adoptive mother of just Rumi. These girls, based in a Seoul skyscraper that is the K-Pop equivalent of Avengers Tower, carry on the traditional work of hunting loose demons and using their gift of song to maintain the honmun/혼문, a mystical barrier that, when fully realized and "golden," will banish demons forever to their hell-realm. But the barrier is currently imperfect, and demons and other otherworldly beings are constantly entering our plane of existence, forcing the girls into battle with their magical weapons. The demon king Gwi-ma/귀마 (perhaps a portmanteau of 귀신/gwi-shin/evil spirit and 악마/ang-ma/devil), always hungry for souls and generally shown as a vague, fiery presence (Lee), listens to a proposal from one of his most cynical and selfish demons, Jinu (Ahn), who declares that the way to defeat the three warriors—who together are the K-Pop group Huntr/x ("Huntrix" in the Netflix subtitles)—is to form a demonic K-Pop boy band called the Saja Boys (in Korean, a saja is a lion, but saja could also be a play on joseung saja, the Korean Grim Reaper). The Saja Boys plan to humiliate Huntr/x in the K-Pop realm, then defeat them by seducing and stealing the souls of Huntr/x's fans. What complicates matters is that Rumi is actually half-demon herself, and she's been hiding this fact from her fellow singer/warriors. On the demonic side, Jinu isn't as selfish and cynical as he seems: long ago, as a mortal human living in desperate poverty with his family, he made a deal with Gwi-ma for fame and fortune through song, and this meant sacrificing his mother and little sister. Centuries later, the memory of that sacrifice tortures Jinu with guilt, and Gwi-ma makes another deal with him: defeat Huntr/x, and Gwi-ma will erase the painful memories. There's plenty of combat and singing and interpersonal conflict as Rumi tries to hide her demonic heritage from her friends while Jinu wrestles with his conscience despite still being in thrall to Gwi-ma.

The film takes inspiration from a variety of non-Korean sources including "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"—a live-action movie filmed like a cartoon—"Buffy the Vampire Slayer," which was about a girl trained to combat demonic forces, and the Spider-Verse toons. The screenplay, cowritten by Kang, Appelhans, and others, is unabashedly Korean in style and visual language: when the girls emote, they look as if they're straight out of the pages of a Korean manhwa: they show fangs when they're angry or voracious, small irises and bug eyes when excited or agitated, daffy/drooling expressions when they suddenly fall in love or lust with the seductively ab-forward Saja Boys, exaggerated rivers of tears when they're sad, etc. And yet, because these are all classic manhwa tropes, I wasn't repulsed by the onslaught of cuteness: if anything, I came away with the sense that all of this was serving the purpose of advancing the story. There was a kind of integrity and coherence here, not randomness.

But while the story has a remarkable internal consistency, some aspects of the plot are puzzling or inconsistent. For instance, a lot is made of how the warrior-girls are in a sort of dialogue with their fans (which is why the demons think it's important to steal the fans from Huntr/x): when the girls' music hits the fans right, the music itself contains a kind of magic that reinforces the honmun, and the fans also radiate an eldritch glow that also reinforces the honmun. But the fans, despite their apparently cosmic role in helping to hold back demons, are also portrayed as generally dumb, excitable, superficial, weak-willed, and easily led astray by the alluring Saja Boys. I was also unsure about the goofy tiger that is initially seen with Jinu (but that eventually also befriends Rumi) along with a six-eyed magpie (ggachi/까치) wearing a tiny horsehair hat stolen from the tiger. The tiger is both a companion to Jinu and a messenger—glowing, wide-eyed, able to pass ethereally through floors and walls at will. I've seen the trope of the tiger-as-messenger before, but usually in the context of a divinity called a sanshin/산신/山神, a mountain spirit that represents the soul of one or more ancient mountains. There are plenty of sanshin-tiger paintings in Korea, but there are also plenty of magpie-tiger paintings (jakhodo/작호도) as well. Since I saw no sanshin (or living dragons, for that matter) in the movie, I can only assume the story was leaning more heavily on the magpie-tiger trope. Also: outside of this movie, I can't say that I've seen six-eyed magpies portrayed anywhere, and maybe it's a function of my cultural ignorance, but I don't think I've seen either magpies or tigers associated with demons or with travel through hell. If anything, tigers are sometimes depicted as fighting demons. I'll have to research further. The hordes of demons (I'm tempted to use the term soldier demons from the Keanu Reeves version of "Constantine") were generally nameless, and the only demon we get to know in any depth is Jinu, four centuries old and not completely demonic. His four companions in the Saja Boys, despite being slightly more fleshed out than the demon hordes, are nevertheless still ciphers. So to what extent are the other demons, other than Jinu, in a similar state of suffering? At one point, Jinu claims that all demons do, far from being unfeeling, is feel and suffer and experience shame, but little more is made of that point. I'm also curious as to whether the demons seemingly slain by the girls' magical weapons are truly slain or merely sent back to their hell-realm. Can a huge demon like Gwi-ma ever be definitively defeated?

The story also doesn't do much with Celine, the foster mother-cum-mentor/master of the three girls, herself a former huntress (Huntrix is a fancifully Latinized form of huntress, a bit like imperatrix for empress). Celine's main value to the plot is that she knows Rumi is a half-demon: Rumi's real mother was a human huntress who fought alongside Celine, but who had a child with a demon (as far as I know, this is never explained). Demons in human form betray themselves by geometric patterns that appear on their arms, torsos, necks, and faces, especially during times of high emotion, which is why Rumi tends to cover herself with long-sleeved garments. Celine has trained Rumi to hide her flaws and her demonic heritage—to be ashamed of her heritage, to reject it so she can fight it better. Unfortunately, like bad karma reappearing where you least expect it, Rumi's shame and her attempts at hiding her nature from her friends turns toxic. Huntr/x is unable to perform its songs because Rumi's voice, hampered by her infernal lineage, starts cracking at crucial moments, and her cracking voice in turn weakens the integrity of the honmun, in which large holes begin to appear, allowing for masses of demons to pour forth into our plane. So Celine is ironically central insofar as her poor teaching has led to the weakening of this new generation of girl-warriors. Otherwise, not much is done to show off her motherly or martial sides.

But the movie's overall story, despite not explaining enough about the cosmic background in which our world is situated, is well told and clear. The characters are all imbued with distinct personalities and a lot of backstory—and speaking of distinct, Lee Byung-hun as the murky, fiery demon king Gwi-ma is easily recognizable since I watched this movie so soon after watching Season 3 of "Squid Game." Lee speaks fluent English, albeit with a slight accent, but the accent works in this film. I understand that he also dubbed his character for the Korean-language version of this movie. The other voice actors all do great work, too.

As much as the movie was a reflection of modern Korea with its K-Pop obsession, rampant tech, and snazzy superficiality, I somewhat expected the story to reflect Korea's current religious reality as well, i.e., to pull from several strains of mythology and spirituality. Currently, the demographic reality in South Korea is that the number of Koreans who see themselves as belonging to a specific religious tradition like Christianity or Buddhism is dwindling: the term mu-gyo/무교/無敎, literally "no -ism," describes people who are, to use Christian language, unchurched, i.e., people who don't routinely participate in structured worship or follow a specific path. This could include atheists, agnostics, the spiritual-not-religious, or people who are formerly Christian or Buddhist, and who retain some of those beliefs but don't have the conviction or sense of community or sensus religiosus to go to a church or shrine* or temple. About 51% of South Korea falls into this category. About 31% are Christian, about 17% are Buddhist, and about 2% might be called "other" (2024 source). So maybe because of my own lingering Christian prejudice, I kept expecting at least one of the three girls to figure out, Christian-style, that combating the demons ultimately wouldn't involve swords or daggers or polearms, but would instead involve shedding lies and pretense while sacrificing oneself for others out of love. But despite one set of song lyrics including the Christian phrase preaching to the choir, "KPop Demon Hunters" was pretty resolutely not Christian. Instead, the movie's resolution moves in the direction of friendship, bonds of love, and the rejection of debilitating lies to embrace truth and one's true nature. It's not a bad solution at all, and really, given the folkloric tropes the movie trafficked in for most of its run time, a suddenly quasi-Christian solution to the problems posed by the plot would have been awkward at best. I still wished there had been dragons and sanshin and other beings as well. (Actually, one character does perform a kind of self-sacrifice, but not totally according to the Christian template: it's in the spirit of self-redemption, not world-redemption.)

So this movie grabbed me and entertained me—way more than I'd thought it would. Unlike "Scott Pilgrim," the characters here were likable and worthy of rooting for. And unlike animated efforts like "Arcane," the story here was less confusing and more relatable. The highest compliment I can pay is that I felt invited into the story. The casting and the cultural milieu were both unrepentantly Korean. Unlike an effort like "Blue Eye Samurai," there was none of the typical Hollywood attitude of "Meh... Asians... they're all the same" leading to the casting of Chinese and Korean actors in Japanese roles for the sake of "diversity" over cultural realism. The mythology was pleasingly folkloric and plausibly Korean, including an encounter with a Chinese-medicine doc who may or may not be a quack. That said, the movie's not perfect: despite all of the characterization and backstory that we do get, there's a lot of cosmic/metaphysical backstory that we don't get. But overall, I would heartily recommend this movie even to my old-fart readers who can't relate to K-Pop realities. I can't either, frankly, but this movie uses K-Pop in a manner that's consistent within its own universe. The whole thing feels hilarious and ridiculous: a group of K-Pop girls are trained warriors who must fight a group of demonic K-Pop boys for the soul of the nation, and perhaps the world. Also: I would definitely recommend this film to people who study religion, mythology, folklore, etc. Better minds than mine can doubtless explain the various tropes, symbols, and metaphors better than I can, and they can also more accurately point out the movie's flaws. But from my simple perspective, "KPop Demon Hunters" turned out to be a peppy, energetic, fun, earnest, heartwarming tale of friendship, honesty, and maybe even a little dose of almost-Christian-style redemption at the very end.

__________

*Of course, people who visit shrines don't normally do so for the same reasons that people regularly go to church or temple. Shrines are less about community and more about being a focal point for individuals or small groups who have a problem and need a spiritual fix. Shrines are also a focal point for people who want to pay their respects to a resident or tutelary power or divinity (or possibly even a relative), just as a way of staying in the good graces of subtle cosmic forces. So shrines aren't churches: you don't visit them every week as part of your regular routine. You visit or pass by a shrine or booth or tent when you need your fortune told, or if you're curious as to what a dead loved one is thinking, or if you need help solving a nettlesome existential problem, or (back to shrines specifically) if you're on a mountain path and see an opportunity to pay respects to the local deity or other divinity.