Watch This K-Pop Horror Movie if You Enjoyed ‘K-Pop Demon Hunters’ But Want Something Much Darker

K-Pop Demon Hunters started streaming on Netflix last week, and it’s been received quite well by audiences. The animated film is fun and funny, and it’s filled with catchy tunes. It’s a crowd-pleasing horror-adjacent musical adventure suitable for all audiences. But as good as it is, K-Pop Demon Hunters doesn’t top a K-pop horror movie I first saw more than a decade ago: White: The Melody of the Curse (2011).

Also known as White: Melody of Death, or sometimes just White, I first learned about the movie when I rented it at a video store sometime in the early 2010s (in that idealistic age when video stores were still hanging on). I loved it, but eventually the DVD disappeared from the store’s shelves, and I couldn’t find it anywhere else. For the longest time White was difficult to find on physical media or on streaming, so it was a movie that I would talk about without being able to tell people where to see it. Thankfully Tubi picked it up within the past couple of years!

White is about a struggling K-pop girl group, the Pink Dolls. They’re hoping for a fresh start and good inspiration when they move into a new rehearsal space, which they learn was unused for years after a deadly fire. The leader of the group, Eun-joo, discovers an old VHS tape inside a compartment hidden behind a mirror. The tape is labeled “WHITE,” and it contains raw footage of a girl group performing a song unfamiliar to the Pink Dolls and their manager.

It’s decided that the Pink Dolls will use the song “White” for themselves. It propels them to instant popularity, but it comes with a curse. In-fighting increases to dangerous levels as the members fight for the center spot, and supernatural happenings of increasing intensity keep happening. It gets pretty gruesome.