This Halloween, trick-or-treaters are putting the final touches on their Rumi, Mira and Zoey costumes—homage to the golden-voiced, blade-wielding trio at the center of Netflix's smash animated hit KPop Demon Hunters.
In the film, the group, known as Huntr/x, is part of a long line of singing female trios throughout Korean history. For centuries, the power of their voices has kept demons at bay. But just as they are about to seal the golden Honmoon, a magical barrier protecting humanity from the demon realm forever, a new boy band arrives on the scene—the insidiously catchy Saja Boys.
The two groups must fight for the ultimate prize: the souls of their fans.
With razor-sharp humor, the film lovingly pokes fun at tropes found in South Korea’s most popular media, while also celebrating them. KPop Demon Hunters also pulls from real folklore and Korean shamanism.
“Shamanism is also a performance. It's dancing, it's a lot of music,” said Angie Heo, an associate professor of the anthropology and sociology of religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. “This film is an elevation of shamanic traditions onto the global K-pop stage for an audience of mass spectators who have a parasocial relationship with these idols.”
In this edited Q&A, Heo talks demons, shamans and holding onto our souls in the face of media’s seductive power. Caution, light spoilers for the film KPop Demon Hunters!
I’m so curious, what did you think of KPop Demon Hunters?
KPop Demon Hunters is a game-changer in The Korea Wave. I mean, you have these seven-year-olds in Chicago singing songs with Korean lyrics.
This may be my personal take, but it’s interesting to consider this film as a diasporic phenomenon as much as it is a global Korea hit. The director, Maggie Kang, is Korean Canadian; you have a Korean-American cast, singers, actors and voice actors. You're seeing Korea throughout the film, almost like a heritage tour.
The whole film is a celebration of the Korean global presence from the diaspora.
The director, Maggie Kang, has spoken about finding inspiration in Korean shamanism. Are the demon hunters supposed to be shamans?
I believe so. Shamans tend to be poor women living in the countryside who are consulted if there's a problem with the spirit world. For example, if someone comes in with a patient and says, “Someone has taken over her spirit” these women will sing for hours while ringing bells and chanting to appease upset ghosts and spirits.
But shamans are not demon hunters, per se.
In shamanism, spirits are wandering, they're restless. Some spirits are evil, but sometimes they are just people who are displaced, who died bad or accidental deaths and were not properly buried. Shamans are reckoning with the restlessness of a soul, and then finding a way to put that soul to rest.
What about their rivals, the Saja Boys?
In the final number, the Saja Boys wear traditional black gats and black robes. This is the uniform for the aristocratic elite and messengers of the royal dynasty. It’s also a play on the Korean Grim Reaper figure, Jeoseung saja. Saja means lion, but it also means messenger.
So there's a gendered dynamic of elite and popular that's being played out between the competing teams.
How is Korean shamanism practiced and perceived in Korea today?
In Korea, Protestant Christianity, Catholicism and Buddhism have more institutional power than shamanism, which is often denigrated as an irrational superstition. Although, there have been recent political scandals that have involved shamanic figures or spiritual consultants.
Now it's become popularized as a symbol of Korean culture and folklore before Christian missionaries or American empire arrived in the Korean Peninsula. It makes sense that it's a sign of cultural and traditional identity in the film, and that K-pop is the vehicle for making it global.
Do the animal characters in the film, the tiger and magpie, also come from Korean shamanism?
The tiger and the magpie actually come from Korean mythology. The tiger is known for warding off evil spirits. You’ll notice the magpie has three eyes, like the cameras on the Samsung Galaxy phone (from a Korean tech company). It's a play on technology and mediumship, because the magpie brings good news, like a telephone.
There are several paintings from the Chosun Dynasty where these two are featured as a pair, sometimes used as political parody. The tiger was the clumsy royal, aristocratic elite and the magpie was the commoner.
How do the demons in the film map onto depictions of demons in shamanism or folklore?
Some of them are spirits, but goblins and water demons are supernatural beings. They have a different status than humans whose souls have been extracted. They're playful. They're not even necessarily bad. Likewise, the Grim Reaper is not evil.
The main demon, Gwi-Ma, is a total invention. A pure evil being, there's no such thing in shamanism.
Part of your research is on sainthood. Do you see any parallels between pop idols and saints, worship and fandom?
The last chapter of my first book was about the canonization politics of the Orthodox popes in Egypt. It asks the question: How do you become a saint without corrupting your soul?
If you gain too much popularity, then you might end up developing hubris. But you need to be popular. You need to collect thousands of stories from all over the world in order to be canonized.
There’s something about popularization by numbers, literally collecting them, that’s an analogy to fandom. There is also a similar way in which you must perform moral virtues for the public.
You’ve also taught classes on Korean media and reality TV. How would you situate the popularity of this film within the greater global wave of Korean pop culture?
I’ve been thinking about the success of this film alongside the Netflix show Squid Game. Both are about extraction economies.
Squid Game is a Korean show that has tapped into a global condition—hyper-capitalism and a staggering gap in class inequality that’s ever-increasing. It turns Korean children's games into this terrible morality tale: Don't lose your soul to the game.
In the same way, KPop Demon Hunters is about celebrity, fandom and keeping your soul in the process of being seduced by these dazzling spectacles. It's a global reckoning with what is real, staying true to yourself in the face of virtual reality. Are you watching BTS and falling in love with characters you don't really know? What does it mean to have real human connections?
These predicaments are a global moral challenge we all can relate to.
