Fortunately for fans of engaging and emotional (and binge-able) watches, there are plenty of K-dramas out there to enjoy, especially on streaming services. Netflix has a wide variety of historical fiction, romantic comedies, supernatural action adventure, and much more. And, as in the case of this highly binge-able show, some have all of these qualities. Whether you’ve just finished a previous K-drama and don’t know what to try next or you’re new to the genre and looking for an engaging watch to dive into, there’s nothing quite as ghostly, funny, and stylish as Hotel del Luna.
‘Hotel del Luna’ Incorporates Several Different Genres
When a soul leaves the living world, it needs a place to rest before continuing into the next portion of the reincarnation cycle. That place is the Hotel del Luna, or the Guest House of the Moon. It appears in the form of a modern hotel to ghosts (and sometimes humans, but only under special circumstances). When a man stumbles into the Guest House of the Moon one night, due to his own selfishness and the manipulation of a higher power, he meets the owner of the hotel, the stylish and moody Man-wol (IU)—and he sells his son Chan-sung’s (Yeo Jin-goo) future away to save his own life. The deal has been made: 20 years into the future, Man-wol will come to claim Chan-sung. And when the day arrives, Chan-sung has no choice but to fulfill the deal and become the manager of the Hotel del Luna.
Collider Exclusive · Horror Survival Quiz Which Horror Villain Do You Have the Best Chance of Surviving? Jason Voorhees · Michael Myers · Freddy Krueger · Pennywise · Chucky
Five killers. Five completely different ways to die — if you’re not smart enough, fast enough, or self-aware enough to avoid it. Only one of them is the villain your particular set of instincts gives you a fighting chance against. Eight questions will figure out which one.
🏕️Jason
🔪Michael
💤Freddy
🎈Pennywise
🪆Chucky
01
Something feels wrong. You can’t explain it — you just know. What do you do? First instincts are the difference between the survivor and the first act casualty.
02
Where are you most likely to find yourself when things go wrong? Setting is everything in horror. Where you are determines which rules apply.
03
What is your most reliable survival asset? Every survivor has a quality the villain didn’t account for. What’s yours?
04
What kind of fear is hardest for you to fight through? Knowing your weakness is the first step to not dying because of it.
05
You’re with a group when things start going wrong. What’s your role? Horror movies are brutally clear about who survives group situations and who doesn’t.
06
What’s the horror movie mistake you’re most likely to make? Honest self-assessment is a survival skill. Denial is not.
07
What’s your best weapon against something that can’t be stopped by conventional means? Every horror villain has a weakness. The survivors are always the ones who find it.
08
It’s the final scene. You’re the last one standing. How did you make it? The final survivor always has a reason. What’s yours?
Your Survival Odds Have Been Calculated Your Best Chance Is Against…
Your instincts, your strengths, and your particular way of thinking under pressure point to one villain you actually have a fighting chance against. Everyone else — good luck.
Camp Crystal Lake · Friday the 13th
Jason Voorhees
Jason is relentless, but he is also predictable — and that is the gap you would exploit.
He moves in straight lines toward his target. He doesn’t strategise, doesn’t adapt, doesn’t outsmart. He simply pursues.
Your ability to keep moving, use the environment, and resist the panic that freezes most victims gives you a genuine edge.
The Crystal Lake survivors were always the ones who stopped running in circles and started thinking about terrain, water, and distance.
You think like that. Which means Jason, for all his indestructibility, would face someone who simply refused to be where he expected.
Haddonfield, Illinois · Halloween
Michael Myers
Michael watches before he moves. He is patient, methodical, and almost impossible to detect — until it’s too late for anyone who isn’t paying close enough attention.
But you are paying attention. You notice the shape in the window, the car parked slightly wrong, the silence where there should be sound.
Michael’s power lies in the invisibility of ordinary suburbia — the fact that nothing ever looks wrong until it already is.
Your spatial awareness and instinct to map every room, every exit, and every shadow before you need them is precisely the quality Laurie Strode had.
You are not a victim waiting to happen. You are someone who already suspects something is wrong — and acts on it.
Elm Street · A Nightmare on Elm Street
Freddy Krueger
Freddy wins by getting inside your head — using your own fears, your own memories, your own subconscious as weapons against you. That strategy requires a target who can be destabilised.
You are harder to destabilise than most. You’ve faced uncomfortable truths about yourself and you haven’t looked away.
The survivors on Elm Street were always the ones who understood what was happening and chose to face it rather than flee from it.
Freddy’s greatest weakness is that his power evaporates in the presence of someone who refuses to give him the fear he feeds on.
Your psychological resilience — the ability to stay grounded when reality itself becomes unreliable — is exactly the quality that keeps you alive here.
Derry, Maine · It
Pennywise
Pennywise is ancient, shapeshifting, and feeds on terror — but it has one critical vulnerability: it cannot function against someone who genuinely stops being afraid of it.
The Losers Club didn’t survive because they were braver than everyone else. They survived because they faced their fears together, and faced them honestly.
You ask the questions others avoid. You look directly at what frightens you rather than turning away.
That directness — the refusal to let fear fester in the dark — is Pennywise’s worst nightmare.
It chose the wrong target when it chose you. You are exactly the kind of person whose fear tastes like nothing at all.
Chicago · Child’s Play
Chucky
Chucky’s greatest advantage is that nobody takes him seriously until it’s already too late. He exploits the gap between how something looks and what it actually is.
You don’t have that gap. You take threats seriously regardless of how they present — and you never make the mistake of underestimating something because of its size or appearance.
Chucky relies on surprise, on the delay between recognition and response. You close that delay faster than almost anyone.
Your instinct to treat every unfamiliar thing with appropriate scepticism — rather than dismissing it because it seems absurd — is the exact quality that keeps you breathing.
Against Chucky, not laughing is already winning. You are very good at not laughing.
Through Chan-sung’s perspective, we meet all manner of ghosts, gods, and everything in between. The hotel staff is all spirits with unresolved grudges, and each dead guest must be the highest of priorities. Chan-sung soon finds himself immersed in a dangerous world where a ghost’s grudge can surpass even reincarnation. Throughout all the odd happenings and deadly adventures, however, Chan-sung begins to understand Man-wol, how she came to be the owner of the Guest House of the Moon, and why they feel so drawn to each other.
Hotel del Luna has plenty of strengths as a drama, but one of the biggest is its creativity. One example is the show’s seamless mixing and matching of genres. At its core, Hotel del Luna is a love story, but it also leans heavily into supernatural action, sprinkles in a bit of horror, and includes plenty of funny moments to offset the scares and emotional beats. A pinch of historical fiction pairs well with the idea of the Guest House of the Moon existing for hundreds of years as the human owners cycle through.
Some episodes are darker and more serious than others, but they all tackle ghostly problems with thoughtful and impactful solutions, especially when it comes to the core cast of characters and how they interact with the supernatural.
‘Hotel del Luna’Mixes Supernatural Shenanigans With Well-Rounded Characters
Chan-sung (Yeo Jin-gu) in an episode of ‘Hotel Del Luna.’Image via tvN
The guests of the Hotel del Luna are a wide variety, from the frightening Room 13 ghost (paired with an appropriately sad backstory) to a deceased bride who just wants a groom. Chan-sung and Man-wol face plenty of ghostly fights, but they mainly use intelligence and cunning to outmaneuver their obstacles. Whether they’re facing the seemingly innocent reincarnation of Man-wol’s greatest enemy or just a tiger that misses its home, the supernatural shenanigans vary in seriousness but never stop being entertaining.
In part because Hotel del Luna’s heart lies with the relationships between characters, those relationships are strong and serve to highlight how well-rounded the main cast truly is. Chan-sung is a kind-hearted hotel manager who uses what he’s learned in the human world to help him in the spiritual world in new and interesting ways. His connection to both the human and spiritual planes of existence is mirrored in his ability to understand and empathize with particularly complicated ghosts, as well as Man-wol’s painful past.
At first, he’s scared and wary of Man-wol, and who can blame him? During one of the very first scenes she appears in, she confidently strides into an award ceremony wearing a stylish purple outfit and shoots a murderer with the very bullet he used for his crime. In time, though, Man-wol can’t help but open up to Chan-sung, sharing not just her duties to the Hotel del Luna but also her love of food and her lavish lifestyle (one that’s quickly growing bigger than her finances allow). Little by little, Chan-sung discovers more about her past and how her soul became bonded to the hotel. Gradually, they learn from and grow with each other.
Chan-sung and Man-wol are fun together and have fantastic romantic chemistry, and they aren’t the only couple in the show that captures hearts. A newly dead student inhabits the body of her bully so that she can have the life she was robbed of and becomes fast friends with the Hotel del Luna’s wholesome bellhop, making for an adorable pair.
Each member of the hotel staff gets their moment to shine, and even some of the side characters feel as though they live full lives (despite some, if not most, of them being dead). Mago (Yi-sook Seo), the many-faced god, manipulates the events of the story from behind the scenes but can’t predict everything; Death himself (Hong-seok Kang) sees every soul off into the tunnel, and even old friends and foes reappear in new ways, making it very difficult to separate a previous life from a current one, especially for Man-wol. This is a show with many, many well-rounded characters who live full lives, and nearly all of them are explored in varying degrees of depth.
‘Hotel del Luna’s Sense of Style Is Unrivaled
IU holding a rifle in ‘Hotel Del Luna.’ Image via Netflix
The Guest House of the Moon has a very specific aesthetic. From the outside at night, the hotel rises high into the sky with the moon behind it, beginning your stay with a truly iconic sight. Inside, the lobby is spacious and polished, and every staff member is impeccably dressed in the Hotel del Luna uniform. Man-wol herself appears in a variety of fashionable outfits, always looking amazing even in dangerous and stressful circumstances. Locations like the Moon Tree, the tunnel, and the Bukhangang Railroad Bridge to the afterlife look appropriately mystic and shrouded in a layer of beauty and mystery.
Beginning as soon as the opening credits, Hotel del Luna’s style and aesthetic are presented beautifully. The sequence that opens every episode introduces its characters, makes use of creepy imagery to foreshadow future ghosts, and captures the magic that underlies the story using a perfect combination of color and mystery.
But Hotel del Luna’s style doesn’t end at setting and costume design. The camerawork in the show uses interesting shots, like slow-motion, Dutch tilts, and rolls, to match the tone of the scene it’s used in, to great effect. The show’s use of the camera roll is especially eerie. The soundtrack beautifully matches the tone of the show, from long romantic moments held for the perfect amount of time to the creepiest of ghostly encounters. The original soundtrack for the show reaches a wide range of emotions, which is the ideal accompaniment for every scene (“Done For Me” is especially effective.)
‘Hotel del Luna’ Is Unforgettable
The Cast of Hotel del Luna standing together for a photo in hotel uniforms.Image via tvN
With a wonderful blend of genres, satisfying arcs, iconic imagery and settings, a stellar opening credit sequence, a beautiful soundtrack, and a sense of style that’s unrivaled, Hotel del Luna should be on your watch list if it isn’t already. The show is a must-watch for fans of not just K-dramas, but of action-packed supernatural romances, with a bit of historical fiction thrown in. As the characters learn more about each other, about love and forgiveness, and the passage of time, you will laugh, cry, and cheer for the staff and guests of the Guest House of the Moon.
