‘KPop Demon Hunters’ director Maggie Kang on how Bong-Joon-ho inspired the Netflix hit

Maggie Kang, co-director of KPop Demon Hunters, had revealed how Parasite filmmaker Bong Joon Ho inspired her Netflix animated hit.

Speaking at Busan International Film Festival, where she was introducing a screening of Bong’s 2006 monster feature The Host, Kang explained the unique impact that that South Korean auteur had on the tone and style of her own film.

“He’s a huge inspiration for me,” she said. “I wanted to mimic his style, in a way, in this movie. I was really inspired by the way he juggled many different tones in [The Host]. I actually didn’t know that you could do that in a movie. It was the first time I had seen it.”

Kang, who was born in Seoul but moved to Toronto as a child, also explained how Netflix had empowered her to create a feature that was specifically Korean – a challenge she welcomed about more than a decade working in Hollywood animation.

“They were very encouraging for me to create a movie that was very culturally Korean,” she said of the streaming giant. “They know, above anyone else, the value of Korean content and how widely it was viewed globally. The desire for an animated film to be Korean is something they really wanted to do so were very open to the idea when I brought it to them.”

It took just 67 days for KPop Demon Hunters to become Netflix’s most-watched film of all time, overtaking Red Notice to reach 300 million views.

Kang said binding universal themes to a specific culture was the key to their success.

“Linking our Hunter mythology to ‘mudang’ (Korean shamans), it just felt very natural, because mudang used song and dance to ward off demons for their communities,” she explained. “It felt like a good idea to link to our concepts, because our hunters do the same thing through concerts, singing and dancing. ”

“When we connected the mythology to something that exists, it also made it possible for a younger audience to believe that an idol group could be doing this kind of job in their life. I like taking something very familiar and putting a twist on it.

Just as Kang’s father introduced her to the work of director Bong, the filmmaker hopes that KPop Demon Hunters will also inspire future generations.

“It feels like we’ve created characters that will impact lives for many generations,” she added. “When these young girls grow up, they will want to share this movie with their kids, just like how I wanted to share Disney films with my daughter.”

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