I watched KPop Demon Hunters with my kids. They were terrified (I was hooked)

Times

3 days ago

It has been something of a shaky summer for Hollywood. The new efforts from the big franchises — Marvel's The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Jurassic World Rebirth, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning — have all made less money than previous instalments and, in some cases, struggled to earn more than their enormous budgets. In June Pixar had its lowest opening weekend with Elio. Everywhere you look, you sense that the film industry is scrambling to discover what people actually want to watch.
The answer is staring them right in the face. What people want to watch is a squadron of animated Korean pop singers punching a load of monsters. KPop Demon Hunters — an animation released quietly on to Netflix in the middle of June — has slowly become a colossal hit.
It is the platform's most watched animation, with 158.8 million views. Over the next few weeks it will most probably overtake Red Notice, the streamer's biggest film to date. Its soundtrack is the biggest of the year, surpassing even Wicked. One of its songs, Golden, hit No 1 here and in the US. What's more, Saja Boys, the fictional boyband who operate as the film's antagonists, are now officially Spotify's highest-charting K-pop group.
It's an enduring success too. Whenever it seems like KPop Demon Hunters is about to fall out of Netflix's top ten, it roars back up to No 1. It's there now. This points to both strong word-of-mouth and repeated viewings. You sense that this one film is single-handedly sustaining thousands of households through a long and tedious summer holiday.
Unfortunately our household is not one of them. And, believe me, I'm as surprised as anyone about this. Visually, the film — made by Sony, and directed by the relative newcomers Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans — is gorgeous. Similar in style to the groundbreaking Spider-Verse movies, KPop Demon Hunters dazzles and explodes in every frame.
The story of a once-in-a-generation girl group tasked with battling soul-eating monsters, some of whom come in the form of a deliberately naff boyband, the film is pacey and funny, full of vivid characters and dialogue. There's a good message about self-acceptance. And the songs are genuinely great, all managing to drill deep inside your brain with surgical precision.
It is also incredibly smart in how it depicts its culture. KPop Demon Hunters comes almost exactly at the peak of hallyu, or the Korean Wave, a decades-long government-backed effort to take Korean pop culture international.
What this means is that we now live in a world where the world's biggest show (Squid Game) and musical act (Blackpink), plus The New York Times's best film of the 21st century (Parasite) are all Korean. And this is driven by an enthusiastic, territorial and obsessive fandom; something that Demon Hunters has cleverly managed to tap into. Spend any time online and you'll find no end of fan-made videos and illustrations inspired by the film.
However, there's something equally aggressive about how K-pop acts are treated. They're clinically put together, trained like soldiers and worked to the bone by teams of managers and executives who reportedly enforce restrictive diets and forbid them from being in relationships. The whole thing is X Factor with the training wheels removed. Four K-pop stars — members of the groups Shinee, f(x), Kara and Astro — have taken their own lives in the past decade. This too is hinted at in the film: the central girl group, Huntr/x, literally have to fight demons while presenting a perfect façade to the public.
So the film is good. And, what's more, we should have been a perfect fit for it. I lived in South Korea for a couple of years in my twenties and have spent the past decade systematically indoctrinating my children in the wonders of the country's culture, to the extent that my ten-year-old now almost exclusively listens to K-pop, with a particular fondness for Twice, I-dle and Le Sserafim. Looking at it logically, we really should have spent the past weeks watching this film on a loop.
I can attribute the fact that we didn't to one thing: KPop Demon Hunters is also a little bit scary. It is, as the title suggests, literally about people fighting demons. And although the design of the demons themselves smartly navigates the line between cartoonish and frightening, my children (seven and ten) may be a smidge too young for the scene where one of the singers decapitates a demon, albeit in silhouette. That happens early in the film, and it is also the moment they decided to bale.
We've been tripped up by this before. Every Saturday in our house we have a movie night where we take turns to pick a film to watch. My wife is notorious for choosing films from her childhood that accidentally traumatise our kids because she's forgotten that, for instance, there's a dead body five minutes into Raiders of the Lost Ark.
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That film was a PG, as is KPop Demon Hunters. Both contain scenes that are slightly more distressing than what our children prefer to consume, which is endless YouTube footage of people playing Minecraft.
I'm refusing to give up. My suspicion is that, once they go back to school in September, so many of their classmates will be talking about the film that they'll crack and try again. And if that doesn't happen, there's bound to be more. One of the most surprising elements about the success of KPop Demon Hunters is the fact that it is an original property. It isn't a sequel, or a spin-off, or a live-action remake. This is that rarest of things in 2025: a film comfortable enough to present its audience with a new idea. But the film's popularity means that all of this is definitely coming.
Netflix has already said that it is 'excited to explore what could be the next adventure' for Huntr/x, which means it's better to look at KPop Demon Hunters as the first stage of a new franchise rather than a standalone film.
There's something slightly depressing about this, especially when this summer's lacklustre box office essentially resembles a parade of franchises long since milked to death. But let's worry about that a decade from now.
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When the sequels — or spin-offs, or even the rumoured live-action remake stage musical — come flooding in my children will be just that little bit older, and hopefully more prepared for the sight of a decapitated demon. And once that barrier has been crossed, there'll be no stopping them. Until then, I'll just keep watching it after they've gone to bed.
KPop Demon Hunters is on Netflix
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