In the past few decades, South Korea became globally known for stylish and eerie horror stories through movies like A Tale of Two Sisters, The Wailing, and Whispering Corridors. But horror has not been quite as integral an element in the success of Korean dramas. While series like zombie horror All of Us Are Dead or monster drama Sweet Home have found massive success, there has yet to be an occult K-drama that truly breaks through. If Wishes Could Kill, with its clever mix of teen drama, tech horror, and occult mystery, stands to break the curse. The reimagining of an age-old ghost story is an intriguing blend of Korean folk tradition and modern tech anxieties that keeps viewers guessing until the very end.
If Wishes Could Kill is an eight-episode K-drama about a group of school friends who get mixed up with a deadly app. The app, called Girigo, grants wishes. All someone has to do is submit a recorded video of him or herself making their wish with their name and birthdate visible, and their wish will be granted. But, as is often the case with these kinds of monkey’s paws, the granting of a wish comes at a great cost—the wishmaker’s life. Once someone’s wish is granted, a 24-hour countdown on the app will start. Once it hits zero, the wishtaker will die.
When class clown Hyeon-wook (Lee Hyo-je) uses the app to wish for a perfect score on his next math test, he is ignorant of the cost. When he aces the test, he happily tells friends Se-ah (Jeon So-young), Geon-woo (Baek Sun-ho), Na-ri (Kang Mi-na), and Ha-joon (Hyun Woo-seok) about Girigo, sending them a link to what he thinks is a godsend. They don’t take the app seriously, until Hyeon-wook cuts his own throat in front of their class, seemingly driven by an unseen force.
Over the course of the series, the surviving friends learn more about the rules of the curse, including that a wishmaker’s countdown will stop once someone else makes a wish. In this way, Girigo has a kind of chain letter logic—you can evade the negative consequences of the curse by convincing someone else to make a wish. Also, only those who have made a wish can see the ghosts that drive the curse. Because of this, they are vulnerable to tricks, including receiving texts and calls designed to convince them their loved ones are talking behind their backs.
All of the wishes made in If Wishes Could Kill
By the time Hyeon-wook dies, two other members of the friend group have already made their own wishes. Geon-woo, who has just started dating Se-ah, wishes that Se-ah’s weekend track training will get canceled so that she can attend Hyeon-wook’s birthday party. And Na-ri, unbeknownst to the rest of her friend group, drunkenly wishes for the deaths of Hyeon-wook and an older friend she parties with named Dong-jae, both of whom are currently annoying her. Na-ri’s countdown stops when Geon-woo makes his wish.
Later, with Geon-woo facing seemingly certain death, Se-ah makes a wish to save her boyfriend, which starts her own countdown. With time running out, Se-ah travels with Ha-joon to visit Ha-joon’s older sister, Ha-sal (Jeon So-nee), who is a powerful shaman. Ha-sal lives in the countryside with her boyfriend and fellow shaman Bang Ui (Roh Jae-won).
If Wishes Could Kill draws much of its cultural detail from the tradition of Korean shamanism, or mu-sok, a religion indigenous to the Korean peninsula. In this belief system, ancestral spirits have an influence on our lives, causing humans good or bad fortune. Korean shamans, or mu-dang, act as a bridge between the spirit world and the mortal world, and use this ability to help clients with a diverse scope of needs, including healing, protection, solving specific problems, or more generally for bringing good fortune or avoiding misfortune. Most Korean shamans are women. It is relatively common for Korean people to visit shamans, even if they are part of an organized religion or do not consider themselves religious.
Shamans have always been a part of life in Korea, but they have faced some prejudice and stigma in modern society. That being said, shamans are currently experiencing a moment in Korean pop culture that recontextualizes mu-dang as hip. There have been several recent reality competition shows featuring Korean shamans, including 2026’s Battle of the Fates on Disney+. In 2024, horror film Exhuma—which is about a group of shamans working to quell a violent and vengeful spirit—became a breakout hit in Korea and internationally. If Wishes Could Kill represents shamanism in a similar way to Exhuma, depicting its shaman characters as low-key warriors capable of great sacrifice and power.
'If Wishes Could Kill' —Courtesy of NetflixWho are Kim Si-won and Do Hye-rung?
The Girigo app has its origins in a tragedy that took place at the protagonists’ school a few years prior to their enrollment. A student, Kim Si-won was the daughter of a local shaman. Ashamed of her mother’s calling and blaming her for the death of her father, Si-won preferred to sleep in an abandoned warehouse rather than at home. The only person at school who knew the truth about Si-won’s mother was her good friend Do Hye-rung (Kim Si-ah).
Si-won was also a tech genius, and worked an app coding challenge with some of the most popular kids in school, including Hye-rung’s crush Gi-tae. When one of the group suggested a wish-making app that incorporates shamanism, Si-won went along with it, desperate to stop discussing anything that could expose her relationship to her “quack” mother.
Meanwhile, a well-meaning Hye-rung was one of the only people in touch with Si-won’s mom, who has developed an alcohol dependence. When Si-won discovered this, she was furious. She launched her app, sending a video of Hye-rung wishing for Gi-tae to fall in love with her all over school. When Gi-tae found out, he ridiculed and physically assaulted Hye-rung, at Si-won’s request.
A humiliated Hye-rung used the app to wish death on Si-won and Gi-tae before killing herself. The wish worked. But before she died, Si-won made her own blood-soaked wish, giving a terrible, ongoing power to the Girigo app. It is the spirit of Si-won that drives the malevolence of the app, though Hye-rung is also trapped by the curse’s power.
'If Wishes Could Kill' —Courtesy of NetflixIn the final episode of If Wishes Could Kill, Se-ah and Ha-sal go into the spirit world to break the curse once and for all. While Ha-sal holds off the spirit of Si-won, Se-ah looks for Si-won’s phone. According to Ha-sal, they must destroy the phone in order to break the curse. Unfortunately, Se-ah’s task is made harder by Na-ri.
In one of the great tragedies of the series, Na-ri turns against her friends. Guilt-ridden about Hyeon-wook’s death and tricked into thinking her friends didn’t care whether she lived or died by Si-won, Na-ri becomes one of the series’ antagonists. Though Na-ri is possessed by Si-won at points, she ultimately chooses of her own free will to try to kill Se-ah. Se-ah must fight Na-ri off again in the spirit world, killing her in self-defense. After taking down her former friend, Se-ah finds Si-won’s phone and destroys it with one of Ha-sal’s arrows. The curse is broken, and Si-won and Hye-rung finally seem able to move on.
While it isn’t a happy ending, given the deaths of Hyeon-wook and Na-ri, the series wraps up with Se-ah, Geon-woo, and Ha-joon still alive. Bang Ui, who was gravely injured while trying to protect the teens from vengeful spirits, also makes it to the end of the series alive. He and Ha-sal have the teens over to dinner, and for a ceremony for Hyeon-wook’s peaceful passing into the next world.
If Wishes Could Kill Season 2
The ending of If Wishes Could Kill leaves the door open for another installment of this series, either with the same characters or with a new set of characters. In the series’ epilogue, Hyeon-wook’s Discord friend, who was the person to originally tell him about Girigo, seeks out Na-ri’s abandoned phone on the school campus. He is led to the phone by a mysterious contact on Discord, who also has the passcode for the phone. When he unlocks Na-ri’s phone, the app is still installed, implying it could be used again.
It’s not clear who the person on the other side of the Discord message is, but it’s possible the messages are being sent by the spirit of Na-ri. Not only would she know where she left her phone and the phone’s password, but she also has a bone to pick with her friends, whom she sees as having betrayed her. We know that the Girigo curse cannot work without someone’s bloody wish at the heart of it; could Na-ri have started a new iteration of the curse before she died?
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