Watching the 98th Academy Awards on March 15, 2026, my heart swelled with pride as KPop Demon Hunters claimed two Oscars — Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song for “Golden,” the first K-pop song ever to win an Academy Award. But what truly stopped me in my tracks wasn’t the trophies themselves. It was the stage.
Performers dressed in Korean hanbok opened with a shamanic mantra. Traditional percussionists thundered alongside dancers whose movements echoed something ancient and unmistakably Korean. Then EJAE, Audrey Nuna, and Rei Ami took the stage as HUNTR/X, and the entire Dolby Theatre — Hollywood actors, industry executives, all of them — waved K-pop lightsticks in unison. As EJAE later told reporters, it was an experience of honoring their ancestors through traditional Korean music on the world’s most prestigious stage.
For international audiences, it may have looked like a visually stunning performance. For Koreans, that rhythm carried something far deeper.
The Film’s Hidden Layer: Mudang as Feminist Healer
On the surface, KPop Demon Hunters is a story about a fictional girl group called HUNTR/X — Rumi, Mira, and Zoey — who balance global pop stardom with a secret life fighting evil spirits. It’s fun, it’s infectious, and its soundtrack dominated charts worldwide.
But beneath the neon-lit Seoul skyline and catchy choruses lies a deliberately Korean concept. The film reimagines the mudang — the traditional Korean shaman — as a modern feminist icon. These young women aren’t passive victims of supernatural forces. They are hunters and healers, confronting dark spirits like Gwi-Ma while protecting their community through the power of honmoon shields rooted in shamanic energy.
Co-director Maggie Kang has spoken openly about making the most Korean film she could. She wrote dialogue in Korean first, then translated it into English, preserving the emotional texture. In her Oscar acceptance speech, she said through tears: “This is for Korea and for Koreans everywhere.”
The film takes the figure of the mudang — historically marginalized, predominantly female, often dismissed as superstitious — and places her at the center of a global narrative. That’s not just entertainment. That’s cultural reclamation.
What Is a Mudang, Really?
In Western contexts, the word “shaman” often conjures images of solitary mystics or new-age spiritualism. Korean musok (shamanic tradition) operates on fundamentally different terms.
A mudang is, at her core, a community mediator. She stands between the living and the dead, between human grief and spiritual resolution. Korean shamanism — also called musok — is a polytheistic folk religion with no central authority, revolving around deities and ancestral spirits. The majority of its ritual specialists are women, and they serve as intermediaries between paying clients and the supernatural world.
Historically, mudang carried the emotional weight of their communities. They gave voice to the voiceless dead, channeled the unresolved sorrow that Koreans call han (한) — a concept often described as accumulated grief passed down through generations — and performed rituals that allowed collective catharsis.
The anthropologist Laurel Kendall, who studied Korean shamans extensively in the 1970s, observed a notable evolution. While gut ceremonies were traditionally performed for healing or helping the dead find peace, they increasingly became about seeking good fortune — reflecting shifts in what modern Koreans need from these ancient practices.
Gut: The Ritual That Cleanses Through Celebration
The electrifying Oscar performance drew from the tradition of gut (굿) — the central ritual of Korean shamanism. But gut is nothing like the solemn, silent ceremonies most Westerners associate with spiritual practice.
A gut is loud. It is visceral. Drums thunder, gongs shimmer, and the mudang shifts between weeping, dancing, and absolute stillness as different spirits are channeled. Three elements compose every gut: the spirits as objects of worship, the believers who seek their guidance, and the shaman mediating between both worlds.
Think of it less as a religious service and more as what scholars describe as a form of psychodrama — a communal event where conflict, grief, and longing are processed through song, dance, and shared food. The Korean concept of heung (흥) — an explosive, life-affirming energy that rises through collective rhythm — is central to this experience. When international audiences at the Oscars felt a visceral thrill during that drumbeat opening, they were, in a sense, touching heung without knowing its name.
Korea’s own government has recognized the cultural significance of these traditions. In 2009, the Jeju Chilmeoridang Yeongdeunggut — a shamanic ritual performed by village shamans to pray for calm seas and abundant harvests — was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. And research published in the journal Religions (2025) reports that more than 50,000 shamanic rituals are still held annually in and around Seoul alone.
Data vs. Destiny: Why Fortune-Telling Thrives in a 6G Nation
Here is where the story takes a turn that puzzles many outsiders.
South Korea is one of the most technologically advanced nations on earth. It leads the world in semiconductor manufacturing, 5G infrastructure, and AI development. Samsung and SK Hynix together control roughly 90% of the global high-bandwidth memory market. Korean startups raised over $7 billion in venture capital in the first nine months of 2025 alone.
And yet, fortune-telling is a $3.7 billion industry in this country. An estimated 300,000 fortune-tellers operate across South Korea, alongside approximately 150,000 practicing mudang. Walk through Hongdae, Insadong, or Gangnam on any given afternoon, and you’ll find saju cafés and tarot booths nestled between tech stores and coffee chains. These aren’t relics of an older generation. University students visit tarot cafés as casual social outings. Young professionals consult saju readers before job interviews or major life decisions. Apps like Jeomsin have brought fortune-telling into the smartphone era, using AI algorithms to deliver daily readings.
The question practically asks itself: Why?
The answer, I believe, lies not in superstition but in something more universal — the human need for narrative in the face of uncertainty.
In a society defined by extreme academic competition, relentless career pressure, and one of the world’s highest rates of social comparison (amplified by social media), Koreans face a particular kind of modern anxiety. Mental health services, while improving, still carry social stigma. Visiting a psychiatrist remains uncomfortable for many. But sitting across from a saju reader who tells you “your luck will shift after spring” — that functions as a low-barrier form of emotional management. It offers the comfort of structure in a world that often feels structurally unfair.
As one Seoul-based cultural commentator put it: people don’t come to hear the future — they come to feel seen.
This isn’t about Koreans being credulous or backward. It’s about a culture that has found its own informal infrastructure for psychological support — one that predates Western counseling models by centuries and continues to adapt to contemporary needs.
The Paradox That Isn’t Really a Paradox
From the outside, the coexistence of cutting-edge technology and ancient spiritual practice might look like a contradiction. But viewed from inside Korean culture, it makes perfect sense.
Korea has never been a culture of simple either/or. Historically, Koreans practiced Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and musok simultaneously, each tradition handling different aspects of life. Confucian rituals governed social hierarchy and ancestor veneration. Buddhist practice addressed questions of suffering and the afterlife. Musok handled the unpredictable — illness, misfortune, the restless dead. This layered approach to meaning-making didn’t disappear with modernization. It simply adapted.
Today, that same adaptability shows up in the way a Samsung engineer might check a fortune-telling app before a product launch, or a startup founder might quietly visit a saju reader before signing a major deal. It’s not that they believe algorithms can’t predict outcomes. It’s that some questions — about identity, purpose, and the weight of choices that data alone cannot resolve — still seek answers in older languages.
If 6G networks connect our devices, perhaps the drumbeat of musok connects something else — a form of spiritual resilience that no bandwidth can replace.
Editor’s Comment
I watched that Oscar performance three times. The third time, I stopped watching the dancers and just listened to the drums. And I realized something: the rhythm wasn’t trying to impress anyone. It was doing what Korean drums have always done — calling people home. In a world racing toward AI-generated everything, it turns out the oldest algorithm in Korea is still a woman with a drum, and she’s not asking for your data. She’s asking how your soul is doing.
More from The Korea Review
Korean drama tragic ending: 7 Powerful Reasons Korean Storytelling Breaks the Happy Ending Formula