*To read other articles on the hit 2025 animated musical KPop Demon Hunters, please go to the Arts & Culture category.*

Similar to the previous article about the music of KPop Demon Hunters (KDH for short), this article will mostly list links to content by others people. It focuses on the mystical weapons in the movie, which are based on Korean shamanism as you might have guessed.

The Korea Heritage Service (국가유산청, https://english.khs.go.kr/), a national government agency, has an official blog where college reporters posted a very well-done article in Korean about KDH: https://blog.naver.com/chagov/223941783143. If you want to read the English translation, most web browsers have translation tools. With Chrome, if you click the triple dot menu and then the “Translate…” option, you will get a computer translation.

The translation tool is not perfect. The original title, “국보로 ‘귀마👹’ 때려 잡는 헌터들의 무기를 탐구해보자!”, roughly translates into “Let’s explore the weapons of the hunters who beat down Gwi-Ma👹 using national treasures!” Gwi-Ma is the boss demon. Chrome instead translates it into “Let’s explore the weapons of the hunters who catch the national treasure ‘Gwima👹’!” The images are alone worth looking at without reading the text.

Euni Cho, Character Designer

Most of the images in the blog article comes from Netflix and Euni Cho, one of the character designers for KDH. The artist’s websites are:

1. Official website at https://eunicho.com/.
2. X, formerly known as twitter at https://x.com/joune5064
3. Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/euni_chobot/?hl=en

Most of Euni Cho’s work for KDH are on X and Instagram. I am 99.99% certain that the artist got approval from Netflix to release these. It is good marketing for the movie, after all. What is unfortunate is that unless you have the corresponding social media accounts, you will not be able to see all the available content. It is a questionable business practice by these large Internet companies.

The Weapons and the Shamans

Three notable images I want to mention from the Korea Heritage Service article have to do with the weapons in the film and the introductory sequence featuring traditional shamans.

Rumi’s phase 1 sword is based on a well-known royal ritual sword called Sa-In-Geom (사인검). Its literal translation is Four Tiger Sword. According to the blog article, the tiger in the name refers to the positive energy of tigers for driving away evil spirits, not their fighting prowess, which is considered a type of negative energy. As for the phase 2 sword, you would need to watch the movie to learn about it.

Mira’s weapon is Gok-Do (곡도), which looks closer to military weapons than ritualistic weapons. Zoey’s blades are called Shin-kal (신칼), which literally means God Knife. They are well-known ritualistic weapons of Korean shamans.

The three original hunters featured at the beginning of the movie look as follows:

In case there are any debates about whether they are Korean shamans or not, here is a photograph of a prosperity ritual led by a shaman. (https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0006765)

Never in my life did I imagine an animated musical that mixes K-Pop, Korean popular culture, and Korean shamanism would become a global phenomenon. For people who have not seen the movie yet, if you have kids, just be warned that Netflix just signed a major toy deal with Hasbro and Mattel: https://about.netflix.com/en/news/netflix-kpop-demon-hunters-forge-master-toy-partnership-with-mattel-and-hasbro. Fun times for parents!