Netflix’s New K-Drama Horror Series Is Already a Global Top 10 Hit

Netflix has another K-drama hit on its hands, and this one comes with a deadly app and a countdown clock. ‘If Wishes Could Kill’, the South Korean young adult horror series that dropped on the platform in late April, has surged into the global top 10 and is generating the kind of word-of-mouth buzz that has become a calling card for the streamer’s best Korean originals.

The series was developed under the working title ‘Wish Your Death’ and directed by Park Youn-seo, with a screenplay by Park Joong-seop. It was produced by CJ ENM Studios and Kairos Makers, with Netflix announcing production in March 2025 under the “Young Adult Horror” subgenre label, specifically designed to blend traditional elements of spirits and curses with modern digital culture.

The series stars Jeon So-young, Kang Mi-na, Baek Sun-ho, Hyun Woo-seok, and Lee Hyo-je as five high school students who discover a mysterious app called Girigo that promises to grant any wish, before realizing the curse attached to using it carries a death sentence. The casting decision was strongly championed by director Park, himself a newcomer to the director’s chair.

All five leads are relative unknowns, and several went to unusual lengths to prepare for their roles, including one actor gaining 20 kilograms and another undergoing intensive choreography training for a possession sequence.

Despite its TV-MA rating for violent content, the series climbed to number one in Korea and number three globally on FlixPatrol within days of its release. Its first-week viewership totaled 16.9 million hours watched, equating to roughly 2.8 million views on the platform. The show sits comfortably in the global non-English top 10, tapping into an audience hungry for high-concept horror with a distinctly Korean sensibility.

Director Park previously served as second-unit director on ‘Kingdom’ Season 2 and co-directed ‘Moving’, and writer Park Joong-seop penned the 2023 horror fantasy ‘Dr. Cheon and Lost Talisman’. The creative duo brought together two distinct horror traditions, weaving the aesthetic of early-2000s J-horror into a framework rooted in Korean shamanism and occult folklore, giving the series a texture that feels both familiar and fresh.

Critical opinion has been cautiously positive. Reviews have praised the show for its visual ambition and the way it uses social media and app culture as a vehicle for supernatural dread, while noting that the characterization can feel thin and the plotting occasionally chaotic. Speaking to the Korea Times, director Park described his approach to the series’ violence as deliberate, saying he came to the conclusion that to differentiate the show from existing horror reliant on jump scares, it needed to depict violence directly and vividly, while making clear that the acts were driven by outside forces rather than the characters themselves.

Netflix has yet to announce a renewal for a second season, though the show’s mid-credits scene hints strongly at a continuing story, and director Park has confirmed he is already developing ideas for follow-up narratives centered on supporting characters. Whether the show earns that second outing may well depend on whether viewership holds in the coming weeks.

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