Once again, I have jumped on the cultural bandwagon long after it has left the station, run out of gas, and been abandoned in favor of the next one. That is to say, I have finally watched K-Pop Demon Hunters. And the consensus that said this is a fun movie is… correct.
Granted, I’m neither a teenager nor Korean, so I’m not the target demographic. And I’ve got to give the disclaimer that I know little about either K-Pop or traditional Korean religion (or mythology or whatever is on display here). So there may very well be something that I’m missing here.
With all those disclaimers given, this is still an interesting movie to watch as a Christian, particularly with the front-and-center role of shame. I’m not going to go over the plot in detail here (you should watch it for yourself–it really is a good one!), but do know that spoilers abound from here on out.
So what about shame in K-Pop Demon Hunters? What we learn in the film is that demons were once human and have been tempted and corrupted by Gwi-Ma, who longs to consume human souls. Jinu is one such human who has been corrupted whom, we learn, abandoned his family so that he could live a life of ease granted to him by Gwi-Ma. For hundreds of years now he has lived with the shame of this action, and that knowledge has just put him more and more under Gwi-Ma’s metaphorical thumb.
In the modern world, Rumi is a member of the girl group Huntrix, who in public are a popular band while in secret they are tasked with destroying demons and building the shield that will ultimate seal Gwi-Ma away from the earth forever. Some of the details of this are a little unclear from my perspective. I think the idea is that the music of Huntrix binds people together and that helps them to collectively resist the lure of Gwi-Ma. (And there is certainly something to think about there as Christians–after all, one of the commands for our gathered worship is to sing. This would be a fun movie to watch and talk about with Keith Getty…)
But Rumi has a secret–she is half demon. How? We’re not told, other than that her mother was a hunter and her father a demon. So Rumi’s shame is the secret of her birth, that will be resolved when Gwi-Ma finally is sealed away forever.
How this all works out you’ll have to watch on your own. I just want to spend a minute looking at the two different kinds of shame here. On the one hand, Jinu has done something awful that he is ashamed of. The proper antidote to this is repentance and forgiveness–something we as Christians have a clear doctrine of because of the work of Christ on the cross.
But Rumi’s shame is something she was born with. Yes, that cascades into lies and deception and all sorts of other problems, but the core of it was not her choice. Here of course you can read your social or political or cultural issues of choice into the film, and ask whether she really needs to be ashamed of herself (though her demon marks do disappear at the end of the film). Is repentance really what is required here?
The film is content to say that exposure is the way we deal with our shame–and that is certainly a necessary step. But it is not the only step, and that is the point where the theme of the film stumbles. It attempts to draw a parallel between Rumi and Jinu that just ultimately doesn’t work.
Yet even with that stumble, it’s still a fun movie. The relationship between sin and shame is one modern Christians need to spend more time thinking about, and K-Pop Demon Hunters is a great place to start doing that.
Dr. Coyle Neal co-hosts the City of Man Podcast and is an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog). He teaches Political Science, Philosophy, and History in Southwest Missouri.
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