Audiences of Netflix’s new South Korean horror hit Squid Game were introduced to a creepy larger than life doll at the end of the very first episode “Red Light, Green Light.” What starts out as a seemingly innocent childlike game quickly turns deadly when contestants are shot and killed after the animatronic doll catches their movements with eyes made of motion sensors. The enormous doll is actually real and was created specifically for the show, but mistakenly ended up on display to the public at a South Korean museum.
Squid Game consists of one brutal game after another where contestants saddled with debt compete with hopes of winning fortunes, unknowingly signing up for a competition with life or death stakes. When Red Light, Green Light is announced as the first game, everyone laughs at the silliness of it, making bets of who will be the first to cross the finish line. Chaos erupts when the first player is gunned down, and the episode concludes in shockingly gruesome fashion.
The success of the grisly and violent show follows in the footsteps of other South Korean horror hits like 2019’s Oscar winning Parasite and 2016’s Train to Busan, the country’s first zombie film. Parasite was the first foreign film to take home the golden statue for Best Picture, and Squid Game is well on its way to becoming Netflix’s most watched show in any language. In fact, the show has become so popular that Netflix is being sued by a Korean Internet provider over surges in traffic.
Given Squid Game’s explosive success, the popularity of the doll from “Red Light, Green Light” quickly overwhelmed Macha Land, the horse carriage museum in Jincheon County, three hours outside of capital city Seoul. The doll manufacturer intended for the doll to be stored privately at the museum, but a miscommunication led to it being put on display following the mid-September release of the show. Ten days later, the museum announced it would no longer display the doll and has since wrapped it up for storage.
Replicas of the doll have since popped up at a central Seoul train station and a crosswalk outside a mall in the Philippine capital of Manila. The doll in the train station was part of a larger set recreated to look like the show’s games, equipped with some workers wearing the same masks as the show’s guards. The set was forced to close early over social distancing concerns after photos of packed lines made their way to social media. The ten foot doll that Netflix installed outside the Manila mall, however, still stands. It even sings the same eerie song from the show, eyes lighting up red if it catches people who continue to walk after the crosswalk light turns red. The Netflix Philippines account posted a video to Twitter showing the shocked and scared reactions of bystanders, juxtaposed with a clip from the show, in a clever publicity stunt.