Aha, you probably thought that this post is about KPop Demon Hunters, didn’t you? That would be due to the title, wouldn’t it? Because the title mentioned KPop Demon Hunters? Well, you’re in for a surprise: it’s just about titling practices. But wait, come back!
Okay, KPop Demon Hunters isn’t that strange of a name for the movie that it is. It is, after all, a movie about some demon hunters who are also K-pop stars. It would be stranger if such a movie were titled ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ or ‘The Splendiferous Adventures of John Cena.’ Those would be ridiculous titles for a movie about demon hunters who are also K-pop stars, because they would be wildly misrepresentative titles in that case. However, the movie that’s actually titled Mad Max: Fury Road is a movie about a character named Max and his dangerous exploits battling along a desert road, and that checks out too. I’m not aware of anything called The Splendiferous Adventures of John Cena, but do write in if you know of such a thing.
Titling, not just in movies but also in any form of media, isn’t just about representing what your story is about. It’s also about how you want to present your story. Kpop Demon Hunters and Mad Max: Fury Road are both very literal titles — they perfectly describe what the viewer can expect. Fury Road is perhaps a bit more evocative: it’s trying to bring emotion into your expectations as well. “This is an action movie,” the title seems to say. The Fast and Furious movie franchise does a similar thing; you can probably tell that it’s about racing, and also that it’ll be pretty action-y. Or you can be comedically overliteral, like with Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Make of that what you will, but it certainly grabs one’s attention.
Sometimes you just want to be evocative while being mysterious about everything else. A Song of Ice and Fire doesn’t tell you much at all about what the story will contain — no mentions of dragons, no mentions of warring kingdoms, no mentions of copious instances of incest — but it carries a certain tone with it. The reader can expect a pretty serious and/or grim read. It doesn’t also quite scream ‘fantasy genre,’ but it’s definitely not sci-fi, is it? There’s just enough left to the unknowing reader’s imagination to possibly attract them, at least to have a look.
That’s another thing about titles: sometimes you want to work within genre conventions, and all the factors with literalness and/or evocativeness still apply. Blade Runner has to be something futuristic and sci-fi-esque, right? But perhaps it could be a martial-arts or samurai movie. It could potentially even be a fantasy title. It certainly could not be the title of a classic Gothic novel from the 1800s, say, or the title of a historical fiction film set in Soviet-era Poland. Most people do in fact judge books by their covers, but also titles. You set expectations for your media piece by titling it a certain way, so genre is another tool for you to consider.
Another approach (one that I like personally) is to have the title just be someone’s name, real or fictional, which works for biopics or biographies, but also any story about a person, including a fictional one. Oppenheimer. John Wick. Happy Gilmore. Furiosa. Violet Evergarden. Even Frankenstein and Dracula. This approach makes clear that the story is about the titular person or character; there are no suppositions about genre or content at all. It could be a poignant and emotional tale, or one filled with nothing but horror, or a cheery feel-good comedy. Anything works, and this is probably the ‘safest’ titling approach for that reason. It also involves the mystery factor that we saw earlier with A Song of Ice and Fire. In some cases there’s less mystery: you’re pretty likely to know who Oppenheimer is, because he was a famous real person. How about Happy Gilmore, though? With a fictional character, the audience/reader has no expectations, so you’d better make your character names snappy too.
Or, on the other end of the spectrum, you can completely subvert expectation. You can give your piece a title that is about your story, but also isn’t. Even outside of just ‘stories,’ it’s what I did with this post’s title. It was a way into the topic which I wanted to discuss. Sometimes this goes too far — look no further than the concept of clickbait — but you have to admit that clickbait works. It gets attention. Sometimes it’s because you want your message to get out to a certain group of people; other times there’s no ‘purpose’ as such, other than to get eyes on your work. Though, I hope this post doesn’t count as clickbait; you could read the first paragraph before clicking in, after all.
So what about KPop Demon Hunters, then? It grabs attention; it certainly grabbed my attention. I couldn’t really believe my eyes when I first saw it. It’s a pretty literal title, as we noted, and tonally it doesn’t say too much, except that it’ll possibly be a tad earnest. The title refers to what the three main leads of the film are, because it really is about the three main leads — similar to what we saw with Oppenheimer. Though, perhaps this film is more about just the main main lead. We can forgive that.
But real talk now — they’re not actually demon hunters. The Kpop Demon Hunters just kill demons when they show up. Hunters actively go pursue their prey. It doesn’t count as hunting if I shoot a deer that wanders up to my front door. But I can see why the movie isn’t titled ‘Kpop Demon Slayers’ either. Anyway, I just needed to get the pedantry out of my system.
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