Much of Squid Game’s appeal comes from that shockingly bleak streak, the way familiar characters are instantly dispatched with dispassionate precision, a sudden shot to the head from a faceless foot soldier. (The bloody body count during episode three’s honeycomb challenge, for example, makes the Red Wedding look like a baby shower.)

Dr Lee says Korean filmmakers have been increasingly attracted to black comedy to explore social ills, pointing to Hwang Dong-hyuk’s previous films Dogani (2011, also known as Silenced), about the sexual assault of deaf children in a school for the hearing-impaired, and Miss Granny (2013), about a 70-year-old woman who reverts to her 20-year-old body, which tackled sexism and ageism.

“These films were hugely popular, dark and funny but poignant about social issues,” she explains. “This tone has become very common in Korea.”

While internationally successful films like Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002) and Oldboy (2003) have lent Korean screen culture a reputation for bloody dynamics, Dr Lee says Squid Game’s wild violence is an anomaly in Korean TV where the dominant “Hallyu-style” exports are generally romantic comedies and melodramas.

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She cites period-thriller Kingdom, Netflix’s first original Korean series which premiered in January 2019, as the TV show which opened the “channel to a world audience” for the success of Squid Game.

“Hopefully it continues,” she says. “Because I guarantee there are more, and even better ones, actually.”

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