By the time I’m writing this, the hype train for KPop Demon Hunters has practically blasted off into space. You may be sick of your kids requesting the songs by now. You may resist watching it because you see so many people fawning over it. You may think it’s okay, but a tad silly to be so popular—it doesn’t, for example, win any awards for adherence to physics (demonstrated early as the girls jump out of a plane, fight demons all the way down, and land on stage for their concert, all while singing with perfect poise). If you’re like me, you love it in all its stylish, silly, emotional glory.1
Is the film overhyped? Maybe. But I think part of the reason for its tremendous popularity is not just its music or animation technique, but because even with its cartoon physics and anime-style exaggeration, it resonates deeply with us. It pictures our universal problem and points to a solution that moves us. For all its unreality, its heart beats with the pulse of reality.
The Nature and Function of Evil
The big bad in KPop, Gwi-ma, controls his minions with their shame. We see this most intimately in the character of Jinu, whom Gwi-ma first tempts—then beats up mentally with accusations of the very thing Gwi-ma himself made possible. The hardest part about all this is that Gwi-ma’s accusations are true. Giving into Gwi-ma led Jinu to abandon his family, and it is Gwi-ma’s voice that now accuses him: “You left them behind. Failed them.” The demon patterns that cover Jinu’s arms “are a constant reminder of my shame. A shame I can never escape.”
This aligns with a biblical theology of evil. Satan is both the tempter (Matt. 4:3) and the accuser (Rev. 12:10). Satan’s name even originates from a Chaldean word meaning “accuser.” And if we look at life honestly, shame controls us all to some degree: we who fail to keep even our own self-made standards. Satan keeps us in his power by piling on our shame, isolating us and making us hopeless. The parallels to this reality in KPop Demon Hunters are uncanny.
Our Natural Response
The complication of KPop Demon Hunters’ good vs. evil plot is that the protagonist demon hunter, Rumi, whose songs are meant to help fortify the world against demons—is part demon herself. Her father was a demon, and she hides her patterns. Her character arc presents us with an accurate retelling of two natural human responses to the shame within ourselves:
1. We hide.
This is the most obvious strategy that KPop Demon Hunters points out. The motto of Rumi’s mentor is, “Our faults and fears must never be seen.” Rumi hides her patterns with turtlenecks and bomber jackets made to look like empowering wardrobe choices but actually meant as cover-ups for what she can’t bear the possibility of exposing. Her tight braid symbolizes her tight control over her life. Others have spoken at length about this element of the plot, so I don’t have much to add to it here, except that using a wardrobe to cover our shame is a tactic as old as the first humans (Gen. 3:7).
2. We work.
Rumi is determined to defeat the demons once and for all, and she has motives beyond just her mission: she thinks that if she accomplishes her goal, she will be free from her own shameful patterns. In the song “Golden,” she envisions the future toward which she is working: “No more hiding, / I’ll be shining / Like I’m born to be.”
This compels her to hustle. While her bandmates Mira and Zoey look forward to a relaxing break after a tour, she pushes up the release of their new single, sending them all back to high-octane work mode without their permission. When Rumi’s voice starts giving out and the girls try a “holistic” approach, Mira explains to the doctor that Rumi is “a workaholic, doesn’t know how to relax…” At her lowest point in the movie, overtaken by the shameful secret now exposed to her friends, she continues to insist, “I can still fix it!”
A recurring discussion throughout the film is that Rumi will not go to the bathhouse with Mira and Zoey. This symbolizes both forms of shame-fighting in our own power. She can’t go to the bathhouse because that would expose her carefully concealed patterns—and she can’t go because why else do you go to a bathhouse except to let loose and relax?
Aren’t we the same? Our hustle culture may just be partially because we sense the need to cover our shame, though we might use the verbiage “justify our existence.” In an existentially-informed secular worldview, we must always be creating and maintaining our meaning. We sell this as liberation, but as Rumi shows, it’s a crushing burden to carry. Her patterns of shame spread the harder she works and the more she covers. She laments, “How am I supposed to fix the world—fix me?” And this resonates with us because we, too, carry global burdens around with us in our pockets, feeling the constant need to better the world without even being able to fix ourselves.
The Way Out
The movie shines not only in accurately representing how shame controls us and how we fruitlessly seek to escape it, but also in pointing toward a true way out. There are two elements it presents to us—again, in the character of Rumi.
1. Confession
Rumi’s movement from utter failure to liberating victory begins with confession. She had already noticed that when she confessed her shame to Jinu, she experienced more freedom. She had confessed in small doses, and the healing came in small doses, too—not complete, but just enough to give her hope that she could still push through with her own strategy to defeat Gwi-ma.
The final battle of the movie begins with her demon patterns completely visible, with no more hope for pushing through to victory. Now a complete failure with nothing more to lose, she confesses fully for the first time.
Gwi-ma, using his normal accusatory tactic: “You think you can fix the world? You can’t even fix yourself.”
Rumi: “I can’t.”
Gwi-ma: “And now everyone finally sees you for what you really are.”
Rumi: “They do.”
This leads to her final song, beginning,
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 [her friends] to be on my side
Her confession brings healing, transforming her demonic patterns of shame into radiant marks of honesty. It wakes up her friends and brings them back together. It begins the victory—but can’t complete it.
2. Sacrifice
Confessing the truth has not made Rumi powerful enough to defeat Gwi-ma. In fact, when he focuses his power, she can barely withstand it and is about to be obliterated—until another character, out of love for her, takes the blast instead. Looking lovingly into her eyes, he is able to impart his soul’s power to her, giving her the ability finally to destroy Gwi-ma.
In “Golden,” Rumi dreamed of “No more hiding, / I’ll be shining / Like I’m born to be.” She thought she could get there herself, by hard work; as one of the creators of the movie has said, “Golden” shows “a dream that they’re chasing of being perfect and beyond reproach.” During Rumi’s full confession in the song “This Is What It Sounds Like,” the melodic progression from those very lines of “Golden” plays again. The connection is clear: Now she really is experiencing no more hiding, shining like she’s born to be. But she didn’t get there by her tight control or her hard work. Her confession met a sacrifice. This is what it sounds like—to be truly free.
I hope you can see how the radiant hope this film offers for Rumi, the rush you feel when you see her running toward Gwi-ma free and full of fire—is what the Christian Gospel offers. Confession and sacrifice are what save us from our shame, too. “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:8-9).
Except—in the Gospel, you confess not to a demon lord or the general public, but to the very one who loves you and sacrificed His life for you. And our confession is met with not only the love of our friends or fans, but with the love and full acceptance of the One we offended in the first place. The freedom and power with which Rumi runs at the end of the film is a beautiful but dim reflection of Scripture’s promise, “Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed” (Ps. 34:5).
Several Christians I know have concerns about the word “demon” in the title, and I respect their convictions if they can’t in good conscience watch the film. Having grown up on anime, I wasn’t worried, knowing from experience that the Asian conception of demon is a far cry from what we mean in the west when we use the term, and is often used as shorthand for “bad spirit,” perhaps like we would use “imp” or “goblin.” But for the concerned, Marian Jacobs has a great head on her shoulders for 1) rejecting the occult and 2) discerning your way through fantastical entertainment biblically, and she wrote about KPop Demon Hunters here. Her book is also superb.
Thanks for this! I really enjoyed how you tied the Gospel with the message of the movie.