Inside KPop Demon Hunters' Record-Breaking Success: "We're Dope. We Did It!"
Kpop Demon Hunters has taken the world by storm! It broke Netflix records to become the platform’s most-watched film ever, while its soundtrack made Billboard Hot 100 history with four Top 10 hits at once. Every day new fans are discovering HUNTR/X, a trio of best friends who are a K-pop girl group by day and demon hunters by night. We’re all rooting for them to seal the Honmoon — and secure the win for Best Animated Film and Best Original Song at the Oscars! In a conversation with Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado, the directors and singers break down the creative process, its history-making soundtrack, and those little details that fans can’t stop obsessing over.
It’s so exciting to see Kpop Demon Hunters become a global phenomenon, especially as an original animated IP that celebrates K-pop and Korean culture. “It feels really incredible, especially as somebody who's Korean,” said director Maggie Kang. “I've had to hide my love of K-pop, especially in the '90s from my non-Korean friends and secretly think that it was cool when they didn't think it was. To see K-pop and Korean culture just be so popular at the moment and people just want to know more about it and really can't get enough of it is kind of incredible as a Korean person.”
“We're dope. We did it,” cheered the singers who bring HUNTR/X’s music to life, with Mira vocalist AUDREY NUNA calling it “reaffirming that Koreans work so hard.” “It was not an easy project. It took a lot of collaboration and back and forth. Communication was key. It was honestly very experimental because it's very new,” said EJAE, who sings for Rumi. “It's also a Korean film that's never been done before, a Korean animated film. It's just really fun to have something that was so difficult to actually make it work. That felt very validating.”
Everyone could agree they were “delighted” to see all the little details the fans gravitated towards in the film. “Caw-caw!” shouted out Zoey singer REI AMI. When HUNTR/X prepares to fight the Saja Boys, Zoey lets out a hilarious war yell that fans loved. “That's all my counterpart, the lovely Yoo Ji-Young. I miss you, girl. Hope you're thriving in Korea. She apparently just did a bunch of adlibs. Like Maggie had her do adlibs for like an hour and then right before the fight scene, it's Zoey with the battle cry. And the fans… it’s the official Zoey call now. I'll be caw-caw’ing till I die.” You can’t help but smile watching the singers talk about Kpop Demon Hunters because their mannerisms are so similar to their characters. They truly embody them.
There was a lot of work done to create each member of HUNTR/X and make them feel specific. “The final stage of that is animation where you're doing the tiniest little things with them. With Zoey, for example, we talked a lot about her as being more of a follower. One of her vulnerabilities is like, ‘Do I belong with these two cool girls? Am I worthy?’ We'd have these tiny choices in animation. They're yelling at the Saja Boys, but […] she's always checking to see, ‘Are you guys mad? Oh, you're mad. Okay, I'm going to be mad.’ Then she starts yelling too,” said director Chris Appelhans. “It's micro. It's a few frames of animation. And you'll have a whole TikTok dedicated to all the times that Zoe is slightly insecure. The granularity of people really noticing that stuff and enjoying like, ‘That's so Zoey,’ that's awesome. It's very rewarding for us and the animators.
Kang continued: “I've seen posts about the little breathing animation that our amazing animators at Sony Pictures Imageworks put in to capture Mira's disappointment and hurt when she sees Rumi’s patterns for the first time. Everybody just noticing little tiny micro emotions that the characters perform that just add to the realness of them. Like everyone picking up on it and really focusing in on it and feeling the same thing that the characters are feeling, I think that's been really incredible.”
In addition to providing Rumi’s singing voice, EJAE wrote several of the songs, including “Golden,” “How It’s Done,” “Your Idol,” and “Hunter’s Mantra.” While she comes from a K-pop trainee background, writing music for Kpop Demon Hunters required more of a storytelling element in the vein of musical theater. “Balancing the two worlds was really hard because K-pop there aren't too many melodies [and] theater and K-pop sometimes lyrically can be very different. It was fun to have Mark [Sonnenblick], who's one of the co-writers,” she shared. “He's in the theater background and I'm in more the pop background and having us like be each other's police of like, ‘No, Mark, that sounds a little weird,’ or Mark would be like, ‘No, come back to the story, guys.’ That was really fun, but also challenging, but the result was amazing.”
“With the film, it has to be cinematic, so adding a lot more harmonies than I usually do. K-pop has a lot of harmonies, but we added more just to make it more like powerful,” added EJAE. “That was key.”
The singers also credited executive music producer Ian Eisendrath for pushing them to the next level. “Just working with Ian was amazing. I also am from a theater background, but I left the theater world when I was 12 to pursue more of different types of music. This was a really cool return to just the love of storytelling on a very visceral level. I learned so much about how I even want to approach my next project as an artist from working with Ian. With him specifically, it's the commitment to excellence and commitment to the story. He had me doing crazy things. I remember I did the ‘Fit check for my napalm era’ line like 37 times or something like that. I think just that commitment, that ruthlessness was a fond, warm memory,” said NUNA, with EJAE echoing: “We just want Ian to say, ‘Oh that's special, that's a special take.’ I love when he says that.”
Not only is K-pop having its moment, but girl groups are also having a huge resurgence in pop culture. “One thing that I think we both really cared about and were proud of is we wanted the music to be great, right? And the girls to be incredible singers and glamorous and awesome on stage. We also had really wanted a lot of screen time for them to be weirdos and wear their pajama pants,” said Appelhans. “It's something that K-pop idols embrace maybe more than other idols is this duality of like, ‘I am amazing, but I'm also just me.’ I think pushing that boundary a little bit and having somebody as funny and weird as Zoey or Rumi, you know, having that be part of their identity and be totally cool and part of what makes them a great pop star is fun. I think it'd be great to keep pushing that direction.”
What’s next for the world of KPop Demon Hunters? “We're really just enjoying the love right now,” said Appelhans. “We're really excited for new chapters and thinking about them a lot. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Watch Kpop Demon Hunters streaming on Netflix — and don’t miss the real-life singers of HUNTR/X come together to perform live for the first time ever on The Tonight Show on October 7.
