When summer rolls around, there’s one thing fans absolutely can’t live without: horror-themed web series. From renting out an entire village to plotting out something as intricate as a TV series, K-pop’s seasonal horror specials have evolved to the point where they could pass for full-fledged movies. When fear sets in, so does instinct, so we get to see the idols at the center of these scary scenarios totally raw and unscripted. One of them crumples in fear, another stays right by their side. After enough reactions like this, the particulars of the group’s dynamics and their overall vibe come into focus. Scary videos might just be the fastest way to get to know a group. Now that we’re in the heart of summer, we’ve rounded up horror shows from five of your favorite groups to fight the heat with terror sweats.
ILLIT: Kill fear with kindness
Night falls on the school as ghosts nurse old grudges. It has all the makings of a classic ghost story, but fear barely stands a chance against ILLIT. It’s not because they don’t get scared—it’s because they try to help the apparitions that others would try to fight off. When a ghost who’s lost her shoes starts screaming, IROHA screams right along with her—still managing to hold out a hand, asking, “Do you want mine?” MINJU, meanwhile, craftily talks down a ghost who asks her to “make me pretty like you” with, “If you want to have hair like mine you have to dye it.” WONHEE even breaks the rule about not untying her tie like it’s nothing, all to help a ghost finish a stage play. ILLIT’s personal warmth puts a delightful twist on the horror formula—enough to get a ghost to say, “You’re so cute.”
The warmth doesn’t stop at a kind moment here and there—it’s backed by a real willingness to play their part right through the fear. YUNAH, who volunteers to go first because “sooner is better than later,” freezes up more than once on her way to the second floor, spouting off fear-laced phrases like “How do you record at a place like this?” as she goes along. But she keeps moving anyway, and doesn’t turn back until she’s put a restless ghost to sleep. MOKA, a horror movie buff who’s never been in a similar situation herself, bolts the second a ghost jumps out of a cabinet, blurting out “sorry!” as she runs—only to turn around and move through the classroom like she’s playing a game of tag with the ghost until she tracks down a doll with a name tag on it. That’s what makes ILLIT so sweet—even when they want to run with every fiber of their being, they finish what the ghosts ask of them before heading back to be with the group. It’s not that they aren’t scared but that they push forward anyway, and that kind of courage brings to mind a magical girl in the midst of a grand adventure. Their kindness extends beyond the ghosts, too. Instead of rushing YUNAH on when she freezes by the stairs, they collectively cheer her on until she’s ready to push through the fear, with WONHEE telling her, “We’re right next to you!” ILLIT doesn’t make their way through that eerie school setting on guts. Instead, they disarm the fear the way they know best—killing it with kindness.
TWS: When you’re family, you can be afraid
Horror YouTubers come to pacify the restless spirit of the deceased owner of a shuttered textile mill. That’s how “Ghost Hunters” opens when TWS steps in, and each of them kicks things off in their own intrepid way. SHINYU and DOHOON show up with blood-red fabric, a glass bottle, and even “chuck flap tail,” confident they’ll “finish in four minutes,” while JIHOON and HANJIN march forward, heads held high as they promise to “show them our coolness as 20-year-olds.” That courage doesn’t last long. The second SHINYU comes face-to-face with a ghost, he crumples to the ground with, “I fainted,” while JIHOON and HANJIN scream at the sound of a single firecracker going off. Where things get really fun is how the gang handles fear. SHINYU and DOHOON throw in the towel partway through, declaring they’re “really giving up,” and even YOUNGJAE and KYUNGMIN, the only two who keep it together enough to finish the mission calmly, chalk it up not to courage but to going in clear-headed “knowing there would be ghosts.” In the face of fear, everybody’s true character comes out—they’re either going to face it, or they’re going to fold, and there’s no changing that. The biggest laughs in “Ghost Hunters” come not just from what the crew has in store for the boys, but from the naked honesty with which they take it on.
They don’t try to hide their fear, in part because they already know each other all too well. Back at base, the group cracks up listening to the screams of whoever’s out exploring, but the second it’s their turn, they’re screaming exactly the same way. It feels more playful since they’re all equally big scaredy-cats about it, and once inside the abandoned factory, they’re quick to come to each other’s side. Even when DOHOON says that he can’t open a fridge because this typical household appliance looks scary to him, it gets treated as perfectly reasonable, with SHINYU simply telling him, “Then don't look inside.” As they oscillate between teasing and helping one another, their adventure runs out the clock before the storyline the crew’s planned out is even half finished. But as soon as the boys hear it’s all over, SHINYU breaks into the first real smile of the whole episode, shouting “Let’s go home!” like failing the mission doesn’t matter and is really nothing more than sweet relief. It’s the kind of thing you can only really say around people you don’t feel any need to hide anything from. Looking terrified and failing the mission don’t even matter. Six boys exploring an abandoned factory, free to be as scared as they want in front of each other—that’s what makes “Ghost Hunters” such a blast to watch.
BOYNEXTDOOR: Horror manga heroes
For BOYNEXTDOOR, a scary situation isn’t a cause for alarm, it’s a problem to be solved. One episode takes place in an abandoned hotel. While JAEHYUN shrinks back and cries out, “Someone stand behind me,” TAESAN pushes ahead, scanning for clues and insisting, “You have to look at these things thoroughly—there could be things that could startle you.” JAEHYUN hits the nail on the head when he says, “Even if there is a killer, I’m not scared if SUNGHO is with me.” Sure enough, SUNGHO just being there becomes a lifeline for the group. Meanwhile, in an episode that takes place in a hospital, LEEHAN calmly picks up a fake blood bag and drinks it, cutting the tension with his antics. Whenever one of them crumbles in fear, another member of the group always steps up for them, each one bringing something different to the table. A group of boys, each with their own personal strengths, banding together to get through a crisis—it’s a classic trope of the kind of shonen manga written for boys, and BOYNEXTDOOR brings it to life in their horror show.
And that trope is at its finest when the crisis deepens. In the hospital episode, TAESAN takes the lead on the clue-finding front, but it’s RIWOO who quietly catches the one detail TAESAN misses, cracking the passcode. He’s also the one who counts out the fruit to open the safe while everyone else is busy raiding the snacks. But the spotlight keeps shifting between them. In “THE ACTION THRILLER,” when WOONHAK grabs a camcorder, saying, “We have to record it … since we could get bitten,” it’s JAEHYUN—who was busy calling his mom in front of a killer just moments earlier—who shuts his worry down flat: “We won’t!” JAEHYUN’s also the one who figures out the zombies’ weakness and finds the key to ensure their escape. And as with any good shonen manga, the boys emerge from the crisis with a tighter bond than they went in with. When they have to make a run for the rooftop to escape a killer, it’s WOONHAK—the one the group teases for being scared of everything—who’s first out of the room and makes sure everyone else gets out too. When LEEHAN starts turning after getting bitten by a zombie, SUNGHO and WOONHAK prop him up and help him to the exit. It’s only after safely making it through such hardships that they can jokingly leave WOONHAK behind in the “SPIN-OFF” episode. They can get their jabs in like that precisely because they know that, when it really counts, nobody gets left behind. If you want to watch a group of boys grow stronger with every crisis they survive together, BOYNEXTDOOR’s collection of horror videos is the place to tune in.
TOMORROW X TOGETHER: Immersive mystery
The members of TOMORROW X TOGETHER are masters of getting completely absorbed in a role. Ahead of releasing “The Star Chapter: TOGETHER,” the group put that talent to the ultimate test with “HELLO STRANGERS,” a mystery show made in collaboration with the writers behind “Crime Scene.” Armed with nothing but role cards outlining their backstories, they become five former classmates who wake up in their now-shuttered school: Choi Hyeongsa (SOOBIN), Choi Gwontu (YEONJUN), Choi Taekbae (BEOMGYU), Kang Dongjeon (TAEHYUN), and Hue Ganho (HUENINGKAI).
Between their old homeroom teacher’s fatal fall right in front of them, a murder six years ago the day the school closed, and the mysterious figure who brought them all back there, there’s a lot of questions that need answering and no one to trust. With no script to follow, the show’s momentum relies entirely on the group believing in their characters. Total immersion isn’t just something they do for the fun of it—it’s the very engine that drives the story.
It doesn’t take long for the group to sink into their roles. Just moments into the story, BEOMGYU turns into Taekbae, lashing out at Dongjeon for blowing his hard-earned paycheck on a bad investment, and TAEHYUN fires back perfectly in character without missing a beat, “I’ll Short today and get you 500 back.” Just a few minutes after reuniting, six years’ worth of grudges written into their role cards start playing out just like you’d expect them to in real life. Interestingly, the more immersed they become in their roles, the more the group members’ true personalities shine through from underneath. There’s BEOMGYU’s persistence as he dodges Mr. Choi, the axe-wielding guard, all while digging through Mr. Choi’s diary to discover a secret son. There’s also SOOBIN’s absolute calm when HUENINGKAI asks, “We’re not going to die here … right?” and he just says, “What are you talking about? I’m right here.” Instead of masking their real personalities, the characters they play actually magnify the TOMORROW X TOGETHER boys’ underlying natures. Because all five of them commit so fully to their roles, it really lands when one of them admits to the true identity they’ve kept hidden for so long. You might go into this video expecting a chill, but what you end up with is a full-blown drama.
The show wraps up with exactly what you’d expect from a group named TOMORROW BY TOGETHER. The group falls into unscripted conversation after the truth comes out and they wait for a comet to fall. HUENINGKAI says, “I won't do shady deals anymore,” and Hyeongsa (SOOBIN) laughs and tells him, “Ganho, I’ll drop the saint nickname.” Taekbae (BEOMGYU), meanwhile, lectures Gwontu (YEONJUN) not to do anything illegal. Only with such serious immersion do you get a scene like this where it’s impossible to tell where the real people end and the characters begin. Watching the comet together they couldn’t six years ago, the five of them finally make peace. In that moment, “HELLO STRANGERS” reaches a level beyond the thrill of a good mystery. Really, it’s the most dramatic show yet of the “TOGETHER” in their name.
SEVENTEEN: All the worry’s a stage
The “GOING SEVENTEEN” horror special returns every year with a new twist. “The Tag,” where the group has to evade a killer in an abandoned factory and find a key to escape, plays like a suspenseful action movie. “EGO” is more of a mystery thriller, where the group members wake up in a research center and pick up where the last group members to run through the scenario left off to get closer to the truth. And “Grudge,” filmed on location inside an entire village, is straight-up found-footage horror. That last one is carefully structured as four discrete stories so that, as the boys enter the village in smaller groups one by one, scenes that don’t mean much when viewed alone take on an entire narrative when pieced together. It’s so meticulous and sweeping in scale that you forget you’re watching a variety show at all. But the crew, who’ve been working together with the group for years, don’t use that craftiness to make things hard on SEVENTEEN. Instead, they show real balance and restraint, crafting a genuinely frightening atmosphere while keeping things manageable for the 13 boys. The crew isn’t trying to scare the idols but give them space to show off everything they’ve got. And SEVENTEEN consistently puts on a performance that exceeds expectations.
The scary settings only bring their personalities into sharper focus. In “EGO,” where they enter the research center one or two at a time, whatever they manage to figure out before getting caught gets passed on as a photo and a short message to whoever’s up next. That chain runs through WONWOO, who stays calm even once he’s on his own to piece together clues and crack the password for a cabinet, and carries all the way to the last one up, MINGYU. MINGYU strings together what everyone else gathered through trial and error and announces the secret they’ve finally uncovered, and the relay-like investigation finally comes to a close. The intel the boys gather while screaming in terror isn’t in vain since it lays the groundwork for whoever comes next. But it’s the scenes between those aha moments where SEVENTEEN really shines. Even when they’re being pursued by a killer in “The Tag,” they don’t run away—they exercise whatever skills each of them does best. There’s THE 8, trying to negotiate with pure logic, suggesting three against one isn’t fair. There’s JEONGHAN, playing it cool right before making a clean break with quick thinking and quicker feet (“I like smiling clowns”). And then there’s HOSHI, who goes as far as trying to win the killer over with a dance lesson for “Left & Right”—unreleased at the time—only to get caught in the end anyway. That’s what makes the “GOING SEVENTEEN” horror specials, well, special: the tonal rollercoaster ride that takes you from gasping in fear one moment to doubling over with laughter the next. Whether you’re looking to be scared out of your mind or beside yourself with laughter, SEVENTEEN’s got you covered. Which is why “GOING SEVENTEEN” is a must every single summer.
