How ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Is Making History And Literally Saving Fans

(Left to right) KPop Demon Hunters co-director and co-writer Chris Appelhans, co-director and co-writer Maggie Kang, EJAE, Audrey Nuna, and Rei Ami at Netflix HQ in Hollywood, California.

Netflix

KPop Demon Hunters is changing lives. That’s not being overly dramatic, as the cast of Netflix’s smash hit animated musical urban fantasy film has receipts.

“I got a lot of DMs from fans and they’re telling me that the movie saved them,” explains EJAE to a handpicked selection of journalists in Los Angeles. She provides the singing voice for Rumi, the lead vocalist and leader of Huntr/x, the titular K-pop group. “There was one fan in particular whose parent had passed away. The next day, her man was like, ‘You should watch KPop Demon Hunters. It’s really good.’ She turned it on, and it immediately grabbed her attention; she watched the whole thing. Then she just started crying. Her man told me it really saved her. He said, ‘I didn’t see her smile for so long, and she got to smile.’ That’s big. The music helped her, and she’s been singing the songs every day.”

EJAE, a South Korean and American singer, songwriter, and record producer, also wrote the hit tracks Golden, How It’s Done, Your Idol, and Hunter’s Mantra from the film’s soundtrack.

KPop Demon Hunters premiered on Netflix three months ago and has since become the most-watched movie of all time on the streamer. It’s been knocked off the top spot a handful of times, but it has repeatedly held the pole position and remains the most-watched film on Netflix ever (to date). It also has four simultaneous top ten hits on the Billboard Hot 100, and the soundtrack has achieved Platinum status – that means it has sold over one million copies. We haven’t even touched on streams because the records, no pun intended, keep on coming and being smashed. It’s a genuine pop culture phenomenon.

Fan Content Is Key To Driving ‘KPop Demon Hunters’s Success

For the uninitiated, KPop Demon Hunters‘ official synopsis describes the plot like this. “When they aren’t selling out stadiums,” it explains, “K-pop superstars Rumi, Mira, and Zoey use their secret identities as badass demon hunters to protect their fans from an ever-present supernatural threat. Together, they must face their biggest enemy yet – an irresistible rival boy band of demons in disguise.”

Even the film’s co-directors and co-writers, Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, can’t quite believe it has become what it has.

“Every day we have a text chain with the producers and Spring Aspers, the President of Sony Music, and we’re just constantly being sent all these records that the movie or the songs are breaking,” she reveals. “Every day we were like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ We’ve lost track of it.”

Appelhans adds, “One of the great things is word-of-mouth. The quality of your film can only do so much to build an audience. Watching that first week to the second to the third, it was really wild. The other side of that has been observing the passion and specificity of all the fan-related content online. They were the best promotion for the film we could’ve ever asked for, and we’re really grateful.”

EJAE, Audrey Nuna, who provides Mira’s singing voice, and Rei Ami, the vocalist for Zoey, consume as much of that content as possible, and they can’t get enough.

“I’ve already acknowledged it on TikTok, but my second most-favorite kind of content is the little fan edits of us,” Ami reveals. “I threw a silly little picture of us on Twitter from the VMAs, and I can’t count them all, but the number of versions of that image is in the hundreds now. There are videos of us interacting like cartoons, and these things take hours to make.”

“Thousands of people are dedicating precious hours in their day to create art of us. I think that truly goes to show how incredible this film is. I think true art inspires other people to act and move, and they are acting and they are moving.”

Here’s What It Took To Get Ready For That ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ First Live Vocal Performance

In another first for KPop Demon Hunters, the trio made their full live performance debut on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show. You can watch that performance here. During a sit-down interview with the host, they found out that the soundtrack had gone platinum. Prepping for the performance was grueling and very different from being in a studio.

“The rehearsals were early in the morning, and we have been constantly singing. It’s about six hours of straight vocal,” Ami reveals. “Golden is a vocal-forward song. It’s like theater camp.”

EJAE adds, “I sing better the more I sing. Weirdly, when I’m three hours in, I get higher and higher, and I can sing better. It’s weird, so I can keep going. It was really fun with these girls because we were trying to figure out moves and when we sounded the best. Audrey doesn’t comment too much. But when she comments, I mean, she freaking means it.”

“And Audrey put the mic down, and she was like, ‘Guys, that felt real,” Maggie confirms.

But there was a reason for her epiphany, which she describes as “an emotional existential crisis” during that milestone rehearsal.

“I’m emotionally constipated,’ Nuna explains. “I process things very slowly. It can sometimes be four to six business weeks delayed, but this was after just two days of rehearsals. There was a moment when I was breaking down in front of these guys. I was like, ‘Oh my God, what is going on? Is this real?'”

“We locked in. We were working on the song, and it’s one song, so we’re doing it over and over and over again for the first time, and I think the moment that we really felt it was when the three of us connected. We felt like one unit, and that was like a really big breakthrough.”

Could ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ Really Save Us All?

For Kang, KPop Demon Hunters’ co-writer and co-director, the film offered her an opportunity to do something she had never been allowed to do before, and it was revelatory.

“For me, the most important thing is I wanted to see really silly women,” the filmmaker who has previously worked on Trolls, The Lego Ninjago Movie, and Minions: The Rise of Gru exclaims. “I think we’re so afraid, especially in animation, to show female characters being really silly and being the silliest one in the room. I have personally experienced that working on films where we have a troupe of five or six main characters, and one happens to be the only female character.”

“We have these hours-long meetings about how to make this one female character unique, and there is a time when I suggested, ‘Well, why don’t we take the funniest character and give it to the girl and make her the funniest?’ and they’d be like, ‘Eh, let’s not do that.’ I was really frustrated by that, so when it came time to make this movie, I was like, ‘Well, let’s make all of them silly.’ I really think there’s empowerment and strength in comedy. It takes a ton of courage to be funny. If you find a group of people that embrace you and your weirdest side, and they are just as weird with you, that is like the best type of friendship.”

What no one involved in KPop Demon Hunters saw coming was the impact the film would have. They just hoped audiences would like it. As the train shows no signs of slowing down, would they be so bold as to say art like this, similarly to the characters in the movie, can save the world?

That answer is yes, and they can explain why.

“I remember, I was at the end of recording What It Sounds Like,” Ami recalls. “During the recording sessions, I got to see the actual scene, and I got to hear the full song with both our parts. It wasn’t mixed or anything, but it was beautiful, and I was crying. At the end of the scene, we were on Zoom, with Ian Eisendrath, our executive music producer, in New York, and me in LA. I looked at Ian and Josh and thought, ‘Guys, we’re going to change the world.’ Then I went home, thought about that comment, and beat myself up. I was so pissed and was like, ‘You’re so cringy. Ew. Gross. Why would you say that?’ Now, looking back, I’m so glad I said it because I feel like it did. I feel like it saved a lot of lives, including mine.”

Appelhans, known for Wish Dragon and Rise of the Guardians, adds, “We all have inner demons. We all have parts of ourselves that can be really destructive, can screw up the way we live and treat other people, and they can win. They can prevail or not. The movie is so much about the way we handle those things, the way we face them, and if we face them together, we have a chance. If we don’t, they’ll win. As much as that seems like a high-fantasy concept, it’s very much about who we are and how we survive.”

However, the final word on the matter goes to Nuna.

“We live in a pretty messed-up world, I would say, and I am personally a believer of this delusion that art can, in many ways, save the world because it connects us,” she muses. “You see, with this movie, it’s just pure joy. You meet a stranger who has watched this, and you feel an immediate connection of understanding. You’re seeing someone who is completely different from you, looking into their eyes, and seeing that they’re a human being. We’re all on this weird ride together. I’m grateful for all of the art that has inspired me, particularly in this moment, KPop Demon Hunters has inspired me in so many ways as an artist, as a human being, and in the sorority that I found with these amazing women, being in service to something bigger than myself.”