Love triangles and ghosts: Park Eun-bin leads tvN’s ‘Spooky in Love’ in a revival of ‘Spellbound’

From Rescene’s remake of “Pretty Girl” (2008) to Mighty Mouth’s revival of “Tok Tok” (2011), Korean pop culture in 2026 seems to have gone all in on late-noughties and early-2010s nostalgia. Now television is getting its own twenty-tens flashback with tvN’s romance comedy “Spooky in Love,” adapted from the 2011 film “Spellbound.”

The upcoming series, set to premiere on Saturday, moves the story to 2026 and gives it a more fleshed-out plot, led by “Extraordinary Attorney Woo” (2022) star Park Eun-bin and a completely new character played by Ong Seong-wu. But the warm romance that made the 2011 hit so memorable remains at its heart, according to director Lee Min-soo.

“What moved me most when I watched the film was that it was ultimately about a man who falls in love with a woman who sees ghosts,” Lee said at a press conference in Gangnam District, southern Seoul, on Tuesday. 

“If he stays close to her, he gets scared and could even find himself in danger. But despite that, he chooses to stay by her side. That power of love was what I thought was most essential," he said.

"Spooky in Love" follows Park as Yeo-ri, an heiress of the Reina hotel group, who can see and talk with ghosts. She can also make others see the spirits through physical contact, which is why gloves have become a fixture of her elaborate, luxurious outfits — a premise not found in the movie. When the seemingly standoffish yet lonely Yeo-ri is forced to team up with Kang-uk — a competent prosecutor who is terrified of anything supernatural, played by Yang Se-jong — to investigate a murder case, the two gradually fall for each other.

“Throughout the drama, the story follows these two people, where one keeps pushing others away and building walls so that no one can come close, while the other keeps knocking on those walls and trying to cross over them,” the director said. “The subtle tension and romance that come from that are what make it fun.”

The original “Spellbound,” starring Son Ye-jin and Lee Min-ki, drew more than 3 million admissions at the Korean box office, ranking it as Korea’s seventh-most-watched romantic film.

The series leans more into the occult than the film did, director Lee said, but that doesn't make it necessarily scarier.

“You know how romantic feelings can sometimes begin to bloom when people go to a haunted house together?" he said. 

“On a scale of [one to] 10, I’d put the fear factor at about a five,” he said. “When ghosts come out, instead of thinking ‘This is scary,’ viewers can take it as a sign that the two characters are about to meet.”

The tvN show also adds a new secondary love interest: Min-hwan, Yeo-ri's rival in the hotel business. Ong, a former member of boy band Wanna One, takes on his first villain role as the Raymond group heir who seems gentle on the surface but hides a more calculating side.

“I’m often told that I look upright and proper,” Ong said. “I wanted to show a different side of myself beyond that image.”

“A villain is someone who can create tension within a story,” he said. “Since this character didn’t exist in the original film, I thought it would be exciting to bring new tension into the relationship between the two leads and exert my own influence on it."

The 12-episode series airs on tvN and streams on Tving and Netflix.

BY KIM JU-YEON [[email protected]]