As with so many important childhood experiences, the obsession with KPop Demon Hunters started at summer camp.
“They got hooked on the songs at camp,” said J Li, a Berkeley parent speaking of her seven-year-old, Li.
San Francisco dad Stephen Lynch recalled a camp dance party attended by his daughter Lennox where half the songs played — more than, Taylor Swift or Beyoncé, Lynch joked — were from KPop Demon Hunters. At a talent show hosted at the camp, Lennox and a friend performed the entire dance number from “Golden,” the movie’s signature song.
“It became this thing where she's just talking to all of her other friends about it,” Lynch said. He’s talking about it, too: He’s seen it five times.
Everywhere these parents have gone this summer, they are inundated by KPop Demon Hunters. A quick summary: It’s an action-cartoon-musical-turned-IRL craze about a girl group that, by night, kicks demon ass until a rival boy group of demons emerges with their own hits. Story-wise, it’s a bit Sinners, a bit ‘90s Disney musical, liberally borrowing from Korean folklore and hallyu. Its soundtrack is written and sung by an army of veteran songwriters in the singular K-pop hit machine. It’s also irresistible.
Demon Hunters first debuted on Netflix in June, and might have faded like every other piece of content the streamer puts out these days. But, as with Labubus and matcha and seemingly every other trend, KPop Demon Hunters was a craze across Asia that was then imported into America.
Perhaps it’s Netflix’s black-box algorithm pushing it into our brains, or just the sheer need for international, feel-good escapism as all American pop culture becomes poisoned by the political moment, but this cross-generational story in which goodness prevails has become catnip for parents and kids. And the general public.
In a way, KPop Demon Hunters was engineered to be massive. Imagine the obsessive fandom of K-pop stans enmeshed with the obsessive fandom of kids discovering their new favorite thing, with a dash of theater kid energy for good measure. A truly cross-platform phenomenon, KPop Demon Hunters isn’t going away any time soon.
For one thing, KPop Demon Hunters is the most-watched film in Netflix history; an in-theater singalong was the number one movie at the box office this past weekend; there is serious talk of Oscar nominations. The songs have taken over the Billboard Hot 100, knocking Morgan Wallen off his chart pedestal. (“Golden,” the biggest breakout hit of the bunch, is very good, even if it is little more than an English-language replica of the superior “I Am” by the real-life girl group Ive.)
Despite the much-discussed end of the monoculture, animated children’s movies can still take over the zeitgeist: Frozen and Encanto shaped a generation of kids following their respective releases in 2013 and 2021. But KPop Demon Hunters feels different. For Li and Lynch and so many others, this is the first time that their kids have latched onto songs with such fervor and for so long.
“This is the only time they've played the soundtrack nonstop, over and over and over,” Li said. “And they're not just singing it as they go about life, but singing it throughout their entire course of play.”
“It is one of the first times where I feel completely just swept up in the wave of kid or teen or tween culture,” Lynch said. “Like, ‘Yes, I am definitely, solidly a parent now.’ I’m just bowled over by this thing. This is everywhere now.”
The success of Demon Hunters has inspired birthday parties and club nights and covers by real-life K-pop idols. But perhaps the most potent display of the KPop Demon Hunters fandom was the event that took the movie out of the realm of kids’ precious screentime and into the real world for one glorious weekend. Theaters all over the city (Alamo Drafthouse, the Balboa, and AMC Metreon among them) hosted singalong watch parties of KPop Demon Hunters with the whole theater encouraged to join in. Both Lennox and Li gathered with big groups of friends to attend.
They weren’t the only ones. The Balboa, according to Lennox’s mother Caroline Nassif, was as packed as she’s ever seen it.
“Several of the kids there were seeing it for the first time, including one 3-year old who sat in front of us with her dad,” Nassif told me over text. “It was her first movie ever, and she didn’t want to leave.”
None of the kids do. While pop culture moves fast and collective memory moves even quicker, kids’ entertainment can have surprising staying power.
KPop Demon Hunters doesn’t seem to be going away; in fact, a sequel is already in the works. Lennox’s parents just got her a Huntr/x shirt and Halloween is right around the corner.
