A Review of K-Pop Demon Hunters
Bizarrely, the internet is lighting up over the question of whether or not K Pop Demon Hunters is Christian. Biblical symbolism? Feminism? The fact that we’re even asking these questions is just a sign of how vulgarized our society’s become. I’d prefer to ask whether it’s a good movie, and whether valorizing K Pop fandom is a good thing to do. (It isn’t.)
The big picture is much more interesting than the movie itself, so let’s consider the grand scale first: that delicate flirtation between nation-states that we call pop culture. To secure worldwide influence, Koreans have formed a brutally efficient social machine. A deep-rooted competitiveness is observable in every aspect of their business, education, entertainment, and even, as a Korean friend told us earlier today over lunch, in their church culture.
They are a people of striving. They are grinding it out. There is something awe-inspiring about Korean intensity, but also distressing about the strict discipline that ambition imposes. In striving, there is very little time for leisure, which we are told is the basis of true culture. And apparently, given their birth rates, there is little time for true sexuality. Striving inevitably leads to a culture obsessed with surfaces. One that is rapidly burning itself out. And where there is little mercy for revealing any flaw or failure. (That last point is what the movie is all about.)
It is not my place as a lazy American to judge Koreans for their social regimen. Where God has set them upon the earth is entirely different from where God has placed me. Who am I to armchair critique the wisdom of a whole people’s striving?
The Republic of Korea is in a tough spot geopolitically. It is a much smaller nation surrounded by rivals, China and Japan, to say nothing of their reclusive sister nation to the north. Korea is too small just to sell to their own domestic markets and remain competitive; they have to target the whole world for their exports. And their government sees it as their national prerogative to promote the spread of Korean pop culture worldwide. In the past two decades, they have been overwhelmingly successful in this mission.
Exporting cars and phones makes enough sense, but what really is a cultural export? Pretty images, pleasant stories, celebrity musicians. In other words: idols.
Soft power means being beloved worldwide.
It means influencing hearts and desires.
Thus K Pop. If you haven’t been living under a rock the past ten years, you will have caught a hint of its ubiquity, even if you can’t rattle off the names of BTS (which are, Wikipedia tells me, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, RM, Jimin, V, and Jung Kook). Everywhere you look, K Pop is found. It is on Twitter. It is on the McDonald’s menu. It is on the Spotify playlists of homeschooled girls. And now Netflix’s K Pop Demon Hunters may represent yet a new peak of Korea’s ever more glorious ascent in dominating popular entertainment worldwide.
This should be of no surprise to us. Unfortunately, because the American pop culture industry is caught in such a death spiral of impurity and ugliness, young people will naturally gravitate to other nations to receive depictions of sweetness, prettiness, heroism, and femininity — all things that our pop culture is no longer willing to provide even the illusion of. (On a long enough timeline, I think this is a serious threat to our global influence as a nation, and our ability to endear ourselves to other peoples.) In the slow spiritual collapse of American pop culture, consumption of Japanese animation has ballooned to enormous proportions, and in the music markets, the whole world has turned its ears to Korean Pop.
Of course, K Pop Demon Hunters is an adventure musical film made in America, by those of both Korean and White descent. American pop culture, protean, cunning, all devouring, is not going to ignore any other cultural templates it realizes it can capitalize on for its own purposes. These filmmakers are so wildly successful that they are even drawing the attention of evangelical Christians, who debate whether their families should be allowed to participate in this phenomenon.
The case for Christian symbolism in this film is reasonable enough — King David dispelled an evil spirit with his music. So also for these cartoon heroines. Traditional Christian iconography interpreted Jesus as the fulfillment of both King David and of the mythic Orpheus — Jesus can control all spirits and all nature with his word; it is he who descends into the realm of death and brings out the lost soul. The film’s symbolism reflects this deep mystery, though the main characters unfortunately act it out with an obnoxious, vapid, TikTok-inflected mannerism.
So, take it or leave it: critics are correct to say it is cringeworthy. Defenders are correct to point out parallels. Personally, I think it’s just an ugly film, and the ugliness is something of an omen.
In this film, beyond fighting demons directly, the heroines sing to bring peace and harmony to all Korean people, sending out ripple effects of love that shield the whole nation, while the demons sneak in from the underworld and use their music to lure in victims, sucking out their souls. Ignorant masses of fans move like helpless sheep between them. Interestingly, in this story, the form of the music is the same either way, suggesting K Pop can be a tool of great good or great evil.
There’s a ring of truth to all this — most people are followers, not leaders. Music is, in fact, a battle for hearts and minds. Some artists protect us and help us build good cultural harmonies. I believe it’s fitting to think of cultural creators this way; they can be guardian angels, or they can devour people’s souls.
It’s also a reminder that we should not seek to be a fan. We should be seeking to create, rather than consume; to protect heroically, rather than follow the winds of culture.
The film’s story wrestles with parental pressure. The main character, Rumi, is told that all flaws and failures must be covered up indefinitely until you fix yourself. But ultimately, like with any other piece of American pop culture, the solution to this dilemma is self-acceptance, friendship, and being famous.
What’s missing is the public confession of sin and a holy God who must be honored. Instead, the only transcendent force our heroines encounter is the king of demons himself, an endless devouring flame that a whole hypnotized stadium of fans turns to walk into before the heroines save them with the power of song:
Nothing but the truth now
Nothing but the proof of what I am
The worst of what I came from, patterns I’m ashamed of
Things that even I don’t understand
I tried to fix it, I tried to fight it
My head was twisted, my heart divided
My lies all collided
I don’t know why I didn’t trust you to be on my side
I broke into a million pieces, and I can’t go back
But now I’m seeing all the beauty in the broken glass
The scars are part of me, darkness and harmony
My voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like
To the film’s credit, this girlboss song is shown to be insufficient on its own to overcome the demon king. What really gets the job done is a soul-restoring, redemptive love and self-sacrifice, all mingled with eroticism.
It’s a deeply erotic film. No sexual acts take place, of course, as it is technically “family friendly,” but the dynamics and humor are deeply sexual. The heroines are repeatedly shown to lust after the demon boy band, their antagonists. They ogle the pretty boys, with literal buttery corncobs floating in their eyes. This is initially played for laughs, but the heart of the narrative tension is a romantic drama between our main heroine and an ancient vampiric K-pop star — yes, a pretty boy, but under a terrible curse, full of shame and regret for his dark deeds.
It’s their attraction to each other, and willingness to die for it, that ultimately cinches things. Thus, hell is harrowed, and souls go floating back to their owners throughout the arena.
The love plot is a sanitized version of the enormously popular monster erotica that is now coming into wider criticism. This is much more of an indictment of American culture than Korean. Internet fandoms have cultivated female sexual fantasies to idolize the bestial more and more. We’re seeing all the warnings of Romans 1 unfold before our eyes.
Though much more pristine, K Pop Demon Hunters still brings us to a similarly disturbing awareness about the sort of men women see as worthy of lust — 400-year-old cursed demon boy band singers who make her feel embarrassed… but then sacrifice themselves to be consumed in flames out of love for her. (I would be interested to see how the romance would have played out differently if the film had been made in Korea instead.)
Girls should be taught to mock this sort of thing. Pop culture doesn’t control sexuality, but it does inform people’s appetites. The erotic monster is not something that ‘fun family films’ should be messing around with.
Still, if the arrival of rock and roll helped herald a sexual revolution so cataclysmic for our country, perhaps K Pop heralds the opposite cataclysm — a great sexlessness sweeping across the land. My parents’ generation came of age in a time of unleashed debauchery, divorce, and disease. Many turned to the gospel then, seeking moral order and purity.
When I say sexlessness, I don’t mean non-sexual or spiritually innocent. K Pop, like almost all fandoms, floats on the surface of an ocean of internet smut. As of the writing of this article, there are already over 7000 works of fan fiction set in the world of K Pop Demon Hunters, a film released a few months ago, uploaded to one fan fiction site alone. And 1000 of these stories are marked as explicitly sexual.
So I just mean sexless in the sense that it is all deeply lonely.
You shouldn’t let your daughters deep into fandom for the same reason you shouldn’t let your sons watch anime pornography: because of idolatry, which is covetousness, which is sexual immorality.
The spirit of our age now is one of sterility — of not being touched by another human being. I pray many will escape out of this corrupt culture into the church, seeking fruitfulness, seeking fatherhood.
It’s not that pop culture is inherently bad. It’s that it is becoming our only culture left, and the fandoms are dominant over all. Fandoms fan the flames in us to love dead, sterile things instead of living in fruitfulness. All that smut is merely the efflorescence of sexual extinction.
Imaginatively, musically, sexually, we are being bound to idols, whether Made in America or brought from across the sea. So also we as people are being extinguished. To be frank, the rates at which both young men and young women are participating in online envy factories and pornography (two sides of the same coin) should cause you to despair that our civilization will continue to exist another generation or two — whether in Korea or in America.
This country is slipping away from us because we allowed ourselves to be thrilled by images! We are becoming unrecognizable to ourselves.
The ultimate assumption of this film is that true self-acceptance happens before a stadium of worshipful fans. It assumes that fandom is good, the way of the world — that it can either be used for protecting people from evil, or leading them to hell. I reject this neutrality.
It’s not wrong to dabble in pop culture. But it is wrong to allow your ideas, your loyalties, and your identity to be determined by mass culture ephemera that you consume. Instead, your own microculture should be formed by:
-worship, church fellowship, and the Lord’s Table
-other actual people that you know and have conversations and do business with
-writing your own literature, poetry, and songs
-exploring the natural world either on foot or through piloting machinery
-mastering handicrafts
-the study of scripture and history
In other words, making things and going places, rather than living for entertainment. This might seem obvious to many mature adults, but look at the way the youth are behaving.
It’s no longer obvious to them that mastering reality is any more rewarding than retreating into media. They must be actively reminded that “Animations” are illusions of living beings; recorded songs are an illusion of breath. We’re beginning to forget this, as a people, the more time we spend looking at screens rather than dwelling in the material world.
Fathers, don’t let your daughters become K Pop stans. Sing them a song of your own. Worship the Son of God. Save their souls.
