Have you heard? The K-pop world has two new musical phenomena to reckon with. Huntr/x and the Saja Boys have been storming the charts in the last two weeks.
Several of their songs are on the Billboard Top 100, and are hovering around the top of Spotify’s US Charts. Huntr/x’s song Golden has a stonking 111m streams. Are they the next big thing? Kind of: only these bands are virtual. In fact, they’re the stars of Netflix’s newest blockbuster film.
Welcome to Kpop Demon Hunters, which has become a stealth hit of the sort only Netflix can really pull off. In just a few weeks since it launched, this film has clocked up more than 33m views, and has reached the top 10 in 93 countries. All this without much marketing at all.
What’s its secret? It’s an unlikely superstar - especially given the title. Three K-pop stars, who moonlight as demon-slayers in their downtime?
It doesn’t sound all that promising. But Kpop Demon Hunters has a few tricks up its sleeve that means it sticks the landing and then some.
First of all, it’s fun. The animation style is bright and peppy, the script is good and the film taps into the phenomenon of Kpop in a way that pretty much no other Western media before it has done - especially not in cartoon form. The film’s heroes, Rumi, Zoey and Mira, and their friendship, forms the heart of the film: in a welcome twist, the romance is relegated to the sidelines.
Plus, the film itself has been developed by Sony. That might not sound like much, but Sony has become a bit of a stealth weapon in the animation industry over the past five or so years.
It was Sony who released Into the Spider-Verse, the convention-busting film from Phil Miller and Chris Lord, which ripped up the Pixar rulebook in favour of an animation style that was fun, different and much more comic-book-esque in style.
Sony’s MO is diversity: it doesn’t have a house style like Pixar, but works seems happy to graze across a range of styles and projects.
This is how we got Spider-Verse, but also how we got Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs (remember that?) and The Mitchells Vs The Machines, the overlooked (but, in my opinion, equally good) animated comedy about an American family trying to reconnect and stop the apocalypse on a road trip. Sony appears willing to take risks – hence them taking a punt on this.
The other thing is the sheer amount of talent packed into the film. Directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans clearly knew that a Kpop film had to sound like a Kpop film.
"Because we wanted the music to be really incredible and really speak to the K-pop fans and be legitimately fit into the K-pop space, we felt that it was important to partner with a Korean label," Kang told Netflix.
The songwriting team here is immense – in addition to Grammy Award winner Lindgren and Teddy Parks, some of the biggest bops were written by Ejae (who also voices Rumi’s singing), a Kpop singer who these days works as a songwriter for some of the biggest bands in the biz: aespa and TWICE among them.
You can tell: the songs aren’t fluff. They are bona fide earworms – small wonder Netflix is putting the film’s lead single Golden in the running for an Oscar next year.
Combine that with the world’s growing familiarity with Korean culture, and what you have is a hit. Shows like Squid Game have brought South Korea into the spotlight; we’ve never been more fascinated by it.
Kpop Demon Hunters embraces this – we see elements of Korean dining customs, cuisine, Hanuiwon (the traditional medicine clinic the girls visit) and even the Namsan Tower. Even the fantasy draws heavily from Korean mythology: the Honmun is made up, but its portrayal of the afterlife, as well as the demons and animals, feels both respectful and accurate. The girls’ weapons, meanwhile, contain visual references to Korean shamans called Mudang.
As the weeks go by, Kpop Demon Hunters’ popularity hasn’t waned. In fact, it’s grown – often by word of mouth, but also on Instagram and TikTok, where my feeds have been deluged by people creating cosplay and fanart around the bands. Don’t be surprised to see a sequel announced in the coming months: with all the hype, our appetite for Kpop is clearly insatiable.
