Simply by inhaling East Asian pop culture, Hwang would have been absorbing the concepts that bubble up in Squid Game. He didn’t specify the comic book but, as pointed out above, the death game genre is long established.
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Squid Game writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk says he was inspired to create the series after reading a comic book about “a group of people who fell into a deadly game”. And, as with Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning Parasite, Squid Game takes a side-ways glance at Korean society – and the widening gulf between its haves and have-nots. He does so by posing as one of the masked attendants presiding over the gristly contestants and dealing death to anyone who commits an error. And there’s a subplot in which a detective attempts to infiltrate the bonkers Bond villain lair where the games are taking place (and which looks like Dr No meets Super Mario Brothers). The protagonists are richly drawn, from gambling addict Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) to traumatised North Korean refugee Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae). There’s more to Squid Game than pedal-to-the-floor brutality. Other rounds include a lethal tug of war, a kill-or-be-killed marbles contest and the eponymous “Squid Game”, in which contestants try to push each other outside an area loosely shaped like a squid. Cracking the wax-like substance earns a bullet to the temple. This is followed by “Honeycomb”, where players must carve out a shape from honeycomb candy. Game one – the doll and the machine guns– is an ultra-violent version of “Red Light, Green Light”, in which children freeze and move on shouts of red or green. In the Netflix smash, desperate individuals facing financial ruin are lured into a sequence of potentially lethal challenges with the promise of a massive pay-day if they survive. Squid Game and shows like it take this tradition of flamboyant nastiness to the next level. And in Orgasm Wars “gay men attempt to bring straight men to orgasm” (Ant and Dec can have that idea for free). In Human Slip n Side a “lube-soaked middle-aged man” is forced to slide over scantily clad young women (sounds like a provincial nightclub from the late Nineties). Nonetheless, the sheer deviousness of these programmes is mind-melting. There is along tradition in East Asia, and Japan especially, of game shows in which contestants are ritually humiliated and forced to undergo trials of torment beyond all human imagining.īBC viewers might say that Noel’s House Party got there first. The pitch is essentially “perverse game show meets prestige television”, but this is not a concept that has dropped from the clear blue sky. This is a milieu which has slowly yet steadily grown in popularity – and has the potential to be Netflix’s hot new speciality.
Squid Game – named after a traditional Korean playground game – is one of the highest profile examples yet of the ‘death game’ genre. Which is extraordinary considering it is hyper-violent, calculatingly brutal and often surreal. Or perhaps its success isn’t all that surprising.
Squid Game is Netflix proving it can still pull a (bloodied) rabbit out of a hat. Dramas such as Bridgerton and The Queens’ Gambit have snagged eye-balls without quite seizing the zeitgeist. It’s been years since it had a credible overnight hit on the scale of Stranger Things. Squid Game also suggests Netflix hasn’t completely lost its mojo. The series has even given a boost to the Korean Stock Market, with two media companies with a stake in Squid Game seeing their value surge by between 50 and 70 per cent. It debuted on September 17 with little fanfare and no marketing push from Netflix. Within 10 days, a gory subtitled show with a bizarre premise had become a must-see phenomenon. Fuelled by word of mouth – and, increasingly, a cult following on TikTok – Squid Game has emerged as the Tiger King of the post-pandemic era.Įveryone involved with Squid Game appears to have been caught unawares by the rapturous response.
Welcome to Squid Game, the Korean ‘death game’ drama that has become the most watched series on Netflix and is on course to be the streaming service’s biggest ever hit. Those remaining still have a shot at a big cash prize. By the end, the field is littered with more than 200 corpses. Anyone moving is cut to ribbons by machine-gun fire. When the doll says “freeze”, in Korean, they must stand rooted to the spot.
Men and women in retro green tracksuits attempt to cross a sandy zone under the gaze of a giant doll with laser eyes. It’s the most hellish game-show concept since Gordon Ramsay’s Bank Balance.
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