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Netflix’s K-Pop Demon Hunters is a smash hit, and my theory is that it’s secretly a prequel to the 1983 cult animated classic Rock & Rule.
Odds are, you’ve at least heard of K-Pop Demon Hunters by now. The animated film is the most popular movie ever to appear on Netflix, with over 200 millions views worldwide. My teenager has been singing “Golden” on a loop for weeks and finally convinced us to watch the movie as part of our weekly family movie night.
Watching it was delightful, but I was immediately struck by how much it reminded me of Nelvana’s famous flop Rock & Rule.
In K-Pop Demon Hunters, three pop stars are responsible for hunting demons while also managing their music careers. The songs aren’t just their day job. These three women are specially trained and chosen to use their voices to strengthen a magical barrier called the Honmoon that keeps the demon king Gwi-ma from entering Earth. Over generations, various teams have sung in groups to make barrier impenetrable. The film ends with the girls finally succeeding.
Rock & Rule takes place in a far distant future Earth where humans are no longer present and the dominant forms of life are anthropomorphic versions of our pets like dogs, cats, and rats. However, the human world hasn’t been forgotten. There are references to the old world everywhere, such as Nuke York being an homage to the human city of New York.
In Rock & Rule, a nihilistic rock star named Mok is determined to unleash a demon on the world. He discovers that the only way to let the demon in is with the voice of Angel, a pop singer. Mok captures her and forces her to sing in his ritual, unleashing a demon on a his crowd of fans, until her boyfriend, Omar, shows up to sing it back into hell with their harmonies. Skip ahead to 1:07 to see the scene.
My theory is that after Gwi-ma was sealed away, only basic maintenance of the Honmoon was necessary. Future demon hunters no longer had to launch massive pop careers to hold the demon world at bay, especially when the demons started to starve from lack of souls from the human world.
Fast forward to the world of Rock & Rule. We know that there are records from the human world, and somehow Mok rediscovers the existence of Gwi-ma and his awesome power. Mok knows that music is a key ingredient to demonic access to Earth, so he begins searching for another voice to break the barrier.
His information is fragmentary, though. He doesn’t understand the necessity of harmonies, which is why his detector technology doesn’t register two voices as a threat when both Angel and Omar are singing.
Meanwhile, Gwi-ma has been imprisoned and starving for eons. When Mok breaks the Honmoon using Angel’s solo voice, Gwi-ma is no longer the erudite and smooth demon king. He’s become a ravenous monster that immediately starts eating people.
The Honmoon is still there, though, just fractured. When Angel and Omar sing together in front of millions of fans, it repairs the breech enough to send Gwi-ma back to the demon world.
None of this was likely intentional on the part of the maker’s of K-pop Demon Hunters. There’s no indication that they’ve ever even heard of Rock & Rule, but the lore slots in so perfectly that it’s worth mentioning.
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Jef Rouner
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