Kpop Demon Hunters Expanded Music’s Mythology with the Pop Culture Event of the Year

Consequence continues our 2025 Annual Report by celebrating KPop Demon Hunters, the Pop Culture Event of the Year. Read our interview with directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans below, and be sure to also check out our rankings of the 25 Best Movies of the Year, our interview with Filmmaker of the Year Guillermo del Toro, and more.

Directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans "reluctantly" acknowledge the fact that KPop Demon Hunters is, in fact, a musical. "We always thought we weren't making a traditional musical. But it kind of is, in so many ways," Kang says.

The smash movie is also the undisputed Pop Culture Event of the Year, a Netflix original movie that took over social media and beyond for fans of all ages thanks to its memorable characters, complex themes, and catchy yet significant songs. In the film, now officially the most watched Netflix original movie of all time, K-pop girl group HUNTR/X moonlights as (you guessed it) demon hunters — despite the dark secret one of them keeps concealed.

The soundtrack is packed with original songs performed by HUNTR/X (the singing voices of EJAE, AUDREY NUNA, and REI AMI, with Arden Cho, May Hong, and Ji-young Yoo performing their spoken dialogue) as well as rival (evil) boy band Saja Boys (Andrew Choi, Neckwav, Kevin Woo, SamUIL Lee, and Danny Chung singing; Ahn Hy-seop, Joel Kim Booster, Alan Lee, SungWon Cho, and Chung speaking). It's this blend of music and story that leads Appelhans to call it "a new kind of musical."

"There were lots of rules that we created for ourselves as to how we wanted to justify the music in the movie and frame it," he says. "We got an education in just how important that is when you have 25 minutes of your 90-minute movie be music. The songs have to advance story and they have to reveal character. That was a big learning curve for everybody."

This doesn't make it any easier for the directors to pick their favorite songs from the soundtrack: "Oh, no, it's like choosing children," Appelhans laughs. (Consequence chose both "Golden" and "Takedown" for our 200 Best Songs of the Year, for what it's worth.)

For Kang, "just as a stand-alone pop song," "Your Idol" stands out because the sequence featuring the Saja Boys track was "so sick," and also because "the idea of a demonic boy group was there from the very beginning, so to see that fully realized was just so magical." However, though her brain likes "Your Idol," "my heart likes 'What It Sounds Like.'"

Appelhans agrees: "I feel like outside of the movie, 'Your Idol' is the song that I listen to the most. I just love the production and how hard it goes. But within the movie, 'What It Sounds Like' was such a journey, and it's kind of the summation of so much of the writing of the film that on a emotional level, that's the one that I feel the most moved by."

When fans reveal their favorite songs to the directors, do they get new insight into that fan's personality? "A little bit," Appelhans says, before admitting to "a little bit of judgement" for those who might pick "Soda Pop." "I'm like, really? I like it, and I love what it does in the film. It's a really, really good catchy song. But that's your favorite?"

Kang does point out that "a lot of kids love it. Which is great. But it's meant to be bright and fluffy and shallow."

Younger kids weren't the original target audience for KPop Demon Hunters; according to Kang, they were aiming for K-pop fans aged 12 to 35. "We don't approach animation as like a medium for children," Kang says. "In North America, it's still seen that way, and we really want to break that." And they had support from their studio on that front, as Sony Pictures Animation has become the home for animated films like Genndy Tartakovsky's R-rated Fixed and the Spider-Verse franchise, which definitely aim for older audiences.

However, Appelhans notes that "even old fairy tales had an element of darkness and risk. There was some heavy stuff couched in something maybe fantastic. And kids are pretty darn smart, and whether or not they have the vocabulary to talk about that stuff when they're seven, they are experiencing versions of it or witnessing it in the world around them. We never wanted the film to be terrifying, but to talk about shame and have a villain who manifests like the inner voice in your head, [a voice] that's toxic. That voice starts pretty early for all of us. I think it's universal."

While this approach meant Kang and Appelhans were bringing darker elements into the story, they quickly discovered that younger audiences were still able to appreciate the narrative. "We wanted to tackle a very hard theme like shame and and really lean into that," Kang says. "And at one of our first public screenings, we could see a seven-year-old girl just being like, 'Yeah, I understand what Rumi's going through.' We were like, 'Oh, it works.'"

"It works"... feels like an understatement.

Both Kang and Appelhans realized that they had a bigger success than they'd anticipated the night the movie officially premiered on Netflix  -- June 20th, midnight Pacific time. "I was watching it, and as I was watching it, I was seeing content being uploaded," Kang says.

Even before the movie's premiere, the trailer had also received a large amount of scrutiny, with fans-to-be dissecting the content frame-by-frame, even picking up on plot points like the fact that Rumi has patterns, hinting at her part-demon heritage. "There were already a lot of theories bubbling," Kang recalls. "I always thought that if we can get the K-pop fans, then there's potential to get everybody."

One big advantage was that K-pop fans, according to Kang, are by nature social media content creators, and the movie's availability on Netflix meant that people were able to share screengrabs and clips quickly. "I think that really built a community and helped with the word-of-mouth marketing for the movie, which doesn't happen a lot," she says.

Appelhans remembers not sleeping during the first week of release, because he kept finding himself checking TikTok for new reactions. "The content creators are so good, and you can tell when they make something that they love it — there's a level of investment in what they're creating, and a precision to it. Like the second or third night, at five in the morning, I was looking at this supercut of all the Rumi and Celine moments. And then I'm reading these comments that were, really in a beautiful way, articulating things that we talked about in the writing room for years, about identity and unconditional love and generational trauma. And there'd be like 20,000 little hearts on the comments. There's something going on here."

It might have something to do with the layers of detail the team infused in the movie, something Kang is thrilled people have picked up on. "Because it's always risky when you do that. We didn't ever want to explain anything, we just implied a lot. And so much of our movie has double meanings. Every scene, every song, has two or three different layers of thought. To see it track with everybody and see people talk about it even more deeply than we could talk about it, it was like, 'Wow, this is great.'"

This was also an opportunity, Kang says, to "create a product I could connect to completely as a Korean person, as a Korean woman, really hitting the authenticity." This even included details like making sure Rumi was holding her sword in a distinctly Korean way — in an earlier version, Kang says, her grip was more Japanese. "We did a deep dive into all those things that most people wouldn't pick up on, but the people who know it will pick up on it and will scrutinize us for it. We made sure that all of it was as Korean as possible."

Kang remembers growing up in Toronto, where the Asian community was primarily Chinese, meaning that all of her friends were also Chinese. "I kind of had to hide my love of K-pop," she says. "Even my Hong Kong friends didn't really listen to that stuff. And then for Halloween, the only Asian female character that you could dress up as was Mulan, and it felt weird for me as a Korean person to dress up as a Chinese character. I dressed up as non-Korean characters my entire childhood, and to see now these non-Korean girls dressing up as Rumi and Mira and Zoey is just cool."

In developing this story as one rooted in Korean culture, Kang says that there were "more words that I wanted to be Korean, and ultimately we just decided not to do that." That's a thing she'd readdress if she could: "Not just for the dialogue, but also in the music — I wish there was a bit more Korean in it. Some songs don't have any Korean, which is fine — something like 'Free' or 'What It Sounds Like,' it's all storytelling. But for me, just hearing Korean lyrics is just so meaningful, you know? That's what, for me, makes K-pop K-pop. Even with new music coming out of K-pop, we're hearing less and less Korean, and it bums me out, to be honest. So I wish that we featured Korean lyrics more."

Appelhans adds that K-pop fandom has already embraced it: "I think both Maggie and my wife were at the same BTS concert at the Rose Bowl [in Los Angeles]. And 70,000 people, the whole diverse range of people who live in LA, all knew the Korean lyrics. People don't mind learning and singing those things. So why not?" Accordingly, Kang and Appelhans agree that there will "probably" be more spoken Korean in the franchise's future.

One thing that's most surprised and delighted Kang and Appelhans is that they've been able to add a new word to the pop culture lexicon: "Honmoon." In the movie, the term refers to the shield barrier created by the Hunters through the power of their music. In real life, Appelhans remembers seeing, a few weeks after the movie's premiere, "videos of people dancing to a remix of 'Golden' at a club, and the caption would be like, 'The Honmoon is sealed.' Or it'd be footage of [Korean artist] Psy, 'keeping the Honmoon strong in 2011.'"

Appelhans credits a fan at a recent Q&A for defining the term: "The feeling that you have when you are collectively sharing a musical experience at a great concert or a great club." From his point-of-view, it's something that already existed — the movie just gave it a name. "It's like the word 'petrichor,' which is the word for how it smells after it rains. I'm sure for many centuries people were like, 'Love this smell.' And then somebody's like, 'We should actually assign a word to it.'"

Kang remembers coming up with the term while developing the movie's mythology, and knowing that "it didn't feel right for it to be an English word. It needed Korean roots. I jotted down a bunch of different Korean words that were kind of explaining it, like shield barrier. It had to be easily said in English, and there are a lot of Korean words that are very hard to pronounce for an English-speaking audience. So the most easy thing that I could think of was that 'hon' means 'soul' in Korean, and then 'mun' is like a door or an entryway."

Thus, they mashed the two words together, and a phenomenon was born. "It felt silly," Kang says, "but then I was like, 'Well, JK Rowling made up 'muggle,' and everybody knows what that is.'"

"I think we inadvertently described a feeling that is pretty universal and gave people a word to use," Appelhans says. "I think that's so cool, because literally one of the founding ideas of the movie was dramatizing just how powerful music can be, and what a force for good vibes it can be."

Looking towards the future of the franchise, including a sequel scheduled for release in 2029, Appelhans feels that "the most fortunate thing about the position we're in is that we made a movie full of stuff that we loved that we hadn't seen in film before. We didn't do it because we thought that would make it an awesome pop culture phenomenon. We thought, let's make a really good movie full of all this stuff that personally we think is awesome and different. So it's a very personal film."

Appelhans believes that "the best thing we can do is do that again, and continue to entertain ourselves and make ourselves laugh in all the ways that are going to be new. Some of it will be similar to the first one, but it also has to grow, just like the audience will grow too. Just trying to keep it as something personal to us, I think, is going to be really helpful, and the only way to not second guess everything and try to reverse engineer something that you can never reverse."

Kang remains excited about the movie having received a theatrical release, which she says was not only a great experience for fans but financially successful. "While making the movie, we wanted to push the boundaries of animation, the types of stories that animation tells," she says. "I think even how the movie was able to garner this fandom organically was really showing our industry that not every movie is the same. The way that people absorb it and the way that it can be marketed... I hope it teaches us that there's different opportunities that we can create."

KPop Demon Hunters is streaming now on Netflix.