K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025)
For the last few weeks, the normies in my life who know I like K-Pop have been asking me about one thing—K-Pop Demon Hunters. That goes double for the normies in my life with kids. K-Pop Demon Hunters has gone from Netflix original content for kids to cultural phenomenon, with a song from the soundtrack hitting number one on the Billboard chart.
I saw the movie because there has been a lot of discussions in K-Pop spaces about the film and its soundtrack and I thought K-Pop Demon Hunters was cute, despite the kidz slop animation style. Its core appeal is actually quite simple. Director Maggie Kang summed it up like this in an interview with the New York Times:
I was basically just trying to make something that I wanted to see: a movie that celebrated Korean culture. And for some reason, I landed on demonology. I thought the jeoseung saja [grim reapers in Korean mythology] — which is what the boys are at the end of the movie with the black hats and the black robes — was such an iconic image from my childhood that I was very scared of, so I knew that I wanted to feature that. And the thought of demons naturally led to demon hunters. I wanted to see female superheroes that were a lot more relatable, who like to eat and make silly faces. We weren’t trying to make them just pretty, sexy and cool. They had very real insecurities and showed that.
And that’s basically it. The film is a nostalgic mix of Korean folklore and old school idols done for a Western audience.
Don’t sleep on that “old school” either because I’m guessing that Maggie Kang is likely in her late 30s or early 40s and the idol culture she’s drawing from appears to be very second generation coded. That was the era where you did have girl group-boy group interactions, as well as heavy duty vocal talents (and very little lip syncing.)
(You’d never see a boy group dancing with a girl group like this in the Current Era. One of the reasons I suspect Allday Project has hit so big in the Korean market has been the utter dearth of male-female idol interactions.)
The silly, relatable idol is also a cornerstone of second generation content with stuff like 2NE1 TV in which you saw the ladies of 2NE1 do things like eat and make silly faces.
And then there’s the “honmoon” that Huntrix is aiming to turn golden and how this seems to be accomplished by the popularity and cultural penetration of the idols’ songs. In Current Year, when 99.9% of idol music is either mass streamed by the fans or dies on the vine, the only idol who has truly managed a massive goldening of the honmoon is the one and only G-Dragon, the top idol from the second generation, whose 2024 MAMA performance video is sitting at 66 million views as of this writing.
The best parallel I can pull for outsiders to the idol culture depicted in K-Pop Demon Hunters is the fictional boy band from Turning Red. 4*Town was the creation of women who had fond memories of boy bands from the late 1990s and early 2000s, like *NSYNC. Well, Huntrix and the Saja Boys are the equivalent for idols.
While the reaction to the film has generally been pretty positive among K-Pop fans, one of the things that has been a source of contention is the popularity and high chart performance of the soundtrack compared to “real” K-Pop groups, with Huntrix and the Saja Boys smashing records held by “real” K-Pop groups. Are the songs “real” K-Pop or is their chart success closer to that of animated film songs like “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” and “Let It Go”?
I’m going to have to give this one to the furious K-Pop fans because after hearing the soundtrack numerous times courtesy of some small children in my life, the music—while having some elements of vintage K-Pop (peep the Black Label’s Teddy and Kush in the credits)—is far more animated film score than K-Pop. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
My takeaway: K-Pop Demon Hunters is a cute kids movie for kids and the music is fun animated kids movie music.
Its success is a tribute to the quality of the film and the score, as well as demonstrating just how big the “K-” content industry has become, especially with the youngest generation and their moms (and grandmas).
As the idol industry implodes in Korea (nobody who loved the Saja Boys is tuning into Cortis and thinking, yes, more of this please) and Hybe stretches its tentacles into every remaining market on Earth to inject subpar product into local markets, K-Pop Demon Hunters sparkles like a glittery, nostalgic mirage.
If you want a better idea of what K-Pop in 2025 has to offer, Kevin Woo (formerly of U-Kiss) and currently voice of “Mystery” in K-Pop Demon Hunters, did a spot-on parody of current boy group songs.
Just like fans of 4*Town needed to dial back to the Year 2000 to find more boy band goodness, fans looking for more Saja Boys and Huntrix are going to need to turn the dial back a decade, at least, for that kind of classic K-Pop goodness (at least since Astro is no longer actively promoting).