Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism / Korean Culture and Information Service

A scene from "Hometown of Legends": a long-running Korean ghost series that ended in 2009

Of all the creatures in Korean mythology, one of the most outstanding is the gumiho (nine-tailed fox).

A gumiho is not always a fox with nine tails; it may take on another form, often that of a beautiful woman in order to seduce men – and lure them to their death.

A creature similar to the gumiho is described in folklore traditions across East Asia, but Korea’s gumiho differs notably from China’s jiuweihu and Japan’s kitsune. The others are also fox spirits with multiple tails, but while those two may indicate good omens, the gumiho is usually depicted as a bloodthirsty, evil creature that is motivated mainly by a hunger for human flesh.

That said, the gumiho frequently appears in pop culture, where the shapeshifting creatures invoke feelings of fascination and lust, not unlike vampires in the West. In the 1994 horror film “The Fox with Nine Tails,” actress Ko So-young plays a gumiho that wants to become human and falls in love with a man. The 2004 TV series “Forbidden Love” depicts a gumiho clan who survive on the livers of cadavers. In the 2006 musical comedy “The Fox Family,” a family of gumiho attempts to lure victims in the belief that if they eat human livers during a once-in-a-thousand-year eclipse, they themselves will become human.

One of the more famous examples is the 2010 romance-comedy TV series “My Girlfriend is a Gumiho” in which a man accidentally frees a gumiho trapped for 500 years inside a painting. The gumiho in this story, played by Shin Min-ah, has a “fox bead” that she can give to others to imbue them with supernatural powers.

Such a bead appears frequently in Korean folktales. It is how the gumiho absorbs energy from a victim. The creature usually slips the bead into and retrieves it from a victim’s mouth during a kiss. But if the victim manages to swallow the bead, they may receive great knowledge or superpowers.

The gumiho has also been featured in several webcomics, including “The Fox Sisters” and “The God of High School,” both started in 2011. One webcomic even inspired the 2021 TV romantic comedy “My Roommate is a Gumiho.” In this one, a male gumiho must live with a female college student after she accidentally swallows his fox bead.

Ko So-young takes flight in the 1994 film "Gumiho," also starring Jung Woo-sung.

Gumiho have been depicted in foreign pop culture as well. The 2020 HBO drama “Lovecraft Country” depicts a gumiho played by Jamie Chung, who must kill 100 men to regain her supernatural form. Detective novel author Martin Limon’s 2017 book “The Nine-Tailed Fox” involves a malevolent woman who was abducting U.S. soldiers stationed in Korea in the 1970s. And the popular video game “League of Legends” features a villainous playable assassin character named Ahri who is a gumiho. There is also a gumiho superhero character in Marvel Comics: the White Fox, Ami Han, who is described as the last gumiho and an agent of Korea’s National Intelligence Service.

There was even a Korean punk band named Gumiho, whose lead singer performed wearing a fox tail.

Whether a man-eating monster or a tortured spirit yearning for personhood, the gumiho is an enduring feature of Korean folklore, and with the increasing interest in the country’s popular culture, it’s highly likely we’ll be seeing more of the creatures in the future.

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