WARNING: The following contains minor spoilers for Squid Game, now streaming on Netflix.
The rising popularity of Netflix's mind-bending series Squid Game speaks to the brilliance of its savagery amid the backdrop of an underworld, winner-takes-all competition. Squid Game feels like the kind of series audiences experience rather than watch. It’s unapologetic in the way it shows people's willingness to cast aside their good nature in pursuit of obscene wealth. But it also provides a deeper, often sympathetic context to the characters' darker motivations and actions. Leaving audiences, much like the competitors, conflicted and on edge until the bitter end.
Squid Game takes place in South Korea, where hundreds of people deeply in debt, marginalized or down on their luck are recruited to participate in an illegal and deadly series of games for huge money. As players are terminated, the final money prize grows bigger. Despite the characters facing death, the show brilliantly captures how desperation and greed can hijack a person’s free will and better judgment.
Is Netflix's Squid Game Really Scary?
The series isn’t scary because of monsters jumping out of closets or from under the bed. The show creates fear on a much deeper, cerebral level. The viewer's sense of fear and dread effortlessly rolls from one episode to the next. It’s continually growing alongside audiences' attachments to the main characters and the deadly stakes they face. They all can’t win -- which means they all can’t survive.
The scariest parts of Squid Game are built around creative tension. Sometimes viewers can clearly see and understand what’s happening on screen, other times not, but always feeling nervous about what’s coming next and why. The competitors' personal plights fuel their unpredictable behavior, and exploiting it for entertainment is central to the game's organizers.
More than the blood and bangs of gunfire, good use of sound helps instill fear, unease and nagging discomfort during so many scenes. The audience isn’t allowed to get comfortable with things like the noises of death or shootings. It helps fuel tension which adds to the scare factor throughout. While Squid Game has some standard startles and "yikes" moments, it’s the stuff of different nightmares that makes it really scary.
Is Squid Game Gory — And How Bloody Does It Get?
The path to victory in Squid Game is literally painted with blood. At times, the show can be an assault on the eyes, especially for the squeamish. The unfiltered looks at black market human organ harvesting are some of the most graphic scenes but still story appropriately. Squid Game manages to bring the blood while servicing the overall story. It’s why the intensity of the most graphic moments still feels like it’s at home in series.
Squid Game's real unsung heroes must be the clean-up teams working off-screen who turn the athletic abattoirs into sparking clean arenas of death for the next round because the amount of blood sprayed, splayed and spread about the place is awe-inspiring. While the gory moments are intense and often deeply unpleasant, the harsh (sur)realism makes it harder to turn away from. Amplifying the detached brutality is the fact that everyone not competing is hidden behind the anonymity of generic masks.
Viewers have so much invested in what happens on screen to these unique characters witnessing their ghastly demise provides closure before moving on and cheering for who’s left. Audiences watching Squid Game at home just come to expect the grisly deaths while never getting used to it.
Does Squid Game Deserve the Hype It's Getting?
As the show progresses, the main characters and their personal struggles are slowly unraveled. Audiences understand their personal stakes and why they are willing to wager death to escape their own realities. More than that, it presents its characters (and viewers) with lots of moral conundrums to consider, including one of the most uneasy; getting away with killing someone in exchange for financial freedom.
Squid Game does a great job exploring the moral and ethical conflicts people can face when it comes to choice versus need. In that way, the series takes a page from the script of Boon Joon-ho's recent Oscar winner, Parasite. No one is forced to be in the games, but the choice to leave -- while it may seem easy on the surface -- is much harder to make for reasons that aren’t always obvious.
The characters all have continual moments and opportunities to make different choices, both in life and during the games. But the characters' selfish desires to take the easy road out only lead to more dead ends. Squid Game reminds viewers there is no winning without honor because greed is always a fool's game.
To witness Squid Game's bloody story, the series is now streaming on Netflix.