By Sam Jennings, New Statesman | A confession: until I was recently informed that it is now the most-watched film in the history of Netflix, I hadn’t once heard of KPop Demon Hunters. The animated film even boasts the first soundtrack in history to place four songs in the Billboard Top 10 at the same time, and a single sing-along weekend run recently topped the UK box office. Yet, honest to God, I had never seen a single thing about it.
In the past, this would have made me hopelessly out of touch. But this is 2025, some three decades into the official internet, and the idea of a single shared culture has all but disappeared. I’d similarly heard absolutely nothing about the film Demon Hunters unseated from Netflix’s charts, 2021’s Red Notice. Increasingly, the enormous mass cultural reach of the major broadcast mediums of the twentieth century seems like a dream. We live in a world of infinite siloed cultural movements; the “mainstream” is getting thinner and thinner.
Ask yourself: when was the last genuine monocultural event? Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour? Barbenheimer? The final season of Game of Thrones? It’s not that we aren’t consuming enough media. No period has ever consumed as much. But the internet has a way of dividing us into specific cultural niches, much as it tends to isolate us in reality. A recent poll showed that 37 per cent of children spend more than six hours a day on their phone, and 6 per cent spent more than ten hours. Some 90 per cent of British children own a smartphone by their 11th birthday. Children’s language is more incomprehensible to adults than ever before. But such fragmentation seems irrevocably built into the world this extraordinary technology has created for us.
Perhaps none of these trends would matter if Demon Hunters was simply a deeper or more interesting film. Yet it seems all too deliberately designed to cater to these depressing trends. When I sat down to watch it, the blitzkrieg of processed slop songs, hyper-edited fight sequences and music video montages overwhelmed my synapses. The film had obviously been made for people with the shortest attention spans imaginable. The film’s titular hunters are a fictional K-Pop (Korean pop) trio, HUNTR/X. At the beginning of the film, the group has just wrapped up a world tour. But villains soon arrive, in the form of a literal demon boy band called the Saja Boys, who must be defeated and banished from Earth through musical performance.
On the one hand, the film points to a potential relocation of mass culture: over the past decade, K-Pop has steamrolled its way into success throughout the Anglophone world. Since 2019, the genre has had its very own category at the Video Music Awards. At this past Sunday’s awards, the voices behind HUNTR/X – EJAE, Rei Ami and Audrey Nuna – presented the Album of the Year prize. Of course, K-Pop has been dominant on its home turf for a long time. The genre’s most manic followers – called saesang fans in Korean – are famous for swarming on the slightest criticism online, breaking into stars’ houses and even indulging in the occasional violent demonstration in support of their chosen artist.
Yet a lot of K-Pop songs tell a depressingly familiar story of pop stardom. Take the highest-charting single from Demon Hunters’s soundtrack – the song which serves as the group’s biggest hit in its own fictional plot – “Golden”. Never mind that the song sounds like it could have been created by an AI. The first time it plays, the film lingers over the drooling faces of HUNTR/X fans, bowled over by its apparent brilliance. In the song, the trio – who are, to be clear, already massively famous – position themselves as young women who struggled and finally realized “the queen they were born to be”. Now they fly in literal golden jets and command legions of fans and deserve to do so.
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Go here to read the rest of this provocative article:
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2025/09/the-dark-heart-of-kpop-demon-hunters/
Sam Jennings, New Statesman, K-Pop, Demon KPop Hunters,
The Dark Heart of KPop Demon Hunters: Netflix’s most popular film conceals an unnerving, dark reality
