Jeoseung Saja Explained: The Korean Grim Reaper Behind the Saja Boys

Summary: Is the Korean grim reaper behind the Saja Boys actually traditional?

• The black hat and black robe the Saja Boys wear aren't Joseon-era dress. That look was invented in 1980 by Choi Sang-sik, the director of the KBS horror anthology Legend of the Hometown, and he has said so himself in interviews.
• In shamanic ritual and in Joseon painting, the jeoseung saja looks nothing like that. He's an official or a soldier, and in painted depictions he wears red armor.
• The traditional count is three — the samchasa. The Saja Boys are five.
• He isn't a villain either. He's a civil servant under King Yeomna who collects a soul once its appointed hour arrives, and at Korean funerals he was a guest to be fed, not a terror to be fled.
• The trap: don't flip too far the other way. Calling the black hat a pure invention is also wrong — some scholars point to late-Joseon funeral bier carvings that already show hatted, robed reaper figures.

KPop Demon Hunters has since taken two Oscars — Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song — and "Golden" spent a cumulative eight weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. And yet the standard explanation of the Saja Boys still fits in one sentence: "they're traditional Korean grim reapers reimagined as an idol group."

That sentence is half right. What the film actually adapted wasn't a folk tradition but a television image manufactured in 1980. There's a broadcaster sitting between the source and the screen, and once you can see that layer, both the praise ("great use of Korean tradition") and the complaints ("the research is sloppy") land somewhere off-target.

What does "saja" mean? Not lion

Start with the name, because most English-language explainers get it backwards.

The saja in jeoseung saja is 使者 — a messenger, an envoy, someone sent on an errand. Jeoseung means the next world. Put together: "the envoy from the other side." It is not 獅子, the lion, even though the two are pronounced identically in Korean and written identically in Hangul.

The film knows this and plays with it. The group's logo carries a lion motif, and their official fandom name is The Pride. Lion on the outside, junior clerk of the underworld on the inside. Plenty of outlets have led with "saja means lion," which reverses the order of operations: 使者 is the meaning, 獅子 is the pun.

Jeoseung saja vs. the grim reaper: not the same job

The English press defaults to "Korean grim reaper," and it's a bad fit in almost every particular.

The Western reaper causes death. He arrives with a scythe and takes the life. The jeoseung saja causes nothing. He is a functionary in the bureaucracy of the afterlife, reporting to King Yeomna, dispatched to escort a soul whose time on the register has come. Closer to a bailiff serving a warrant than to a personification of mortality.

The most famous of them come from the Jeju shamanic narrative Chasa Bonpuri: Gangnim Doryeong (Gangnim Chasa), Yi Deok-chun, and Hae Won-maek. Gangnim carries the jeokpaeji (赤牌旨), a red roster with the name of the deceased written on it. Name on the list, you go. Name not on the list, you don't. There is no room in the system for personal malice — it's paperwork, all the way down. Gangnim isn't a Jeju-only figure either; he turns up in Hamgyong-do shamanic song as well.

The black hat is only 46 years old

So where does the familiar silhouette come from — black gat hat, black dopo robe, bloodless face, dark lips?

From KBS's Legend of the Hometown, 1980. Director Choi Sang-sik has explained in interviews that he built the look while trying to work out what a distinctly Korean image of death should be, and joked that he wishes he'd secured the rights to it. The costume that every Korean pictures instantly on hearing "jeoseung saja" was born in a television studio, not a shaman's ritual.

But it's worth not overcorrecting. Calling it an invention from nothing isn't accurate either. Some scholars note hatted, robed reaper figures among the kkokdu — the small wooden carvings that decorated late-Joseon funeral biers. The National Folk Museum of Korea holds an 1856 bier from Sancheong with roughly fifty such carvings mounted on it. The safe formulation: the form we know today was fixed by television in 1980, and there are arguments that similar elements existed earlier in folk carving.

What the shamanic and painted record does show clearly is a different palette. Following the folklorist Kim Deok-muk's account, the ritual saja appears as a soldier or official in court dress or armor, and figures like the gamjae saja in Joseon hell paintings are rendered in red armor. Not black. An official needs authority, not gloom, and authority in that visual grammar means armor.

The Saja Boys are clearly descended from the television version, not the red-armored one. Line it up: Legend of the Hometown (1980) → Goblin (2016, modernized into a black suit and fedora) → Along with the Gods (2017, a three-man reaper team) → KPop Demon Hunters (2025). The film is the latest entry in a 45-year pop-culture lineage, not a restoration of the source.

Three became five

The number matters too.

In shamanic practice there are usually three reapers — the samchasa. Funerary rites in Hwanghae-do set out three bowls of rice, three pairs of straw sandals, and three sets of spoons and chopsticks to receive them. That's the sajabap, the reaper's meal. The sandals are the detail that gives the game away: you assume the visitors have worn theirs out on the long road, so you offer a fresh pair for the walk back.

Nobody offers fresh footwear to a monster. In traditional funerals the jeoseung saja was received and honored rather than feared — formidable, yes, but a guest who understood etiquette.

Along with the Gods kept the team at three, which matches the tradition exactly. The Saja Boys are five: Jinu, Abby, Mystery, Romance, and Baby Saja. Five isn't a folklore number, it's a K-pop number. Five gives you stage formations, distinct positions, and a fandom split across members. That's the moment the reference switches from shamanic ritual to the idol industry.

What the film kept and what it invented

The largest change isn't the costume or the headcount. It's moral alignment. The traditional reaper has no side; he executes what the ledger says. The film puts him on the side of evil. That's where invention does the heaviest lifting.

So is it bad research?

No — but not for the reason usually given.

Director Maggie Kang has said the HUNTR/X concept came out of gut, the Korean shamanic ritual. Women who fight malevolent spirits through song and dance is, more or less, a mudang's job description. This isn't a film that changed the tradition out of ignorance; it moved it into the grammar of pop, deliberately. Making the reapers villains is a story decision, not a misunderstanding.

There is one criticism worth sitting with, though. A review of the art historian Heo Gyun's work on traditional symbolic codes points out that tiger-and-magpie paintings belong to a talismanic genre meant to repel disaster and disease, and that placing them in the same frame as a guide of the dead is an awkward pairing by the logic of traditional iconography. Derpy, Sussie, and the Saja Boys sharing a world is modern rearrangement, not inherited grammar.

What the film performed, in the end, is an adaptation of an adaptation. A red-armored official in shamanic ritual and Joseon painting. A man in a black hat, invented for television in 1980. Five idols, animated in 2025. Roughly four centuries between the first two layers and forty-five years between the last two.

Knowing the original doesn't diminish the film. It adds a floor beneath it. And the sequel is officially confirmed, targeting 2029 — so there's still time for someone to put the red armor on screen.

Sources

• Korea Herald: explainer on the jeoseung saja