Horror K-Dramas Based on Webtoons

Here's a thing I only noticed after about my fifth Korean horror binge: the shows that actually scared me were mostly comics first.

Not loosely inspired by. Adapted, panel for panel, from something originally read on a phone during a commute, one vertical scroll at a time. And once you know that, you start seeing the fingerprints everywhere — the framing, the cliffhangers, the specific way a scene will end on a face doing something you can't quite interpret.

Seven of the best, ranked, with the source comic named so you can go read it afterwards and argue about what got cut. For the wider genre list, including everything that came from an actual original script, that's over in 10 Horror K-Dramas That Will Haunt You Long After Watching.

Why Webtoons Are Horror K-Drama's Secret Source Material

A webtoon adaptation arrives at the studio with several problems already solved:

• The pacing is pre-tested. Webtoons are serialized weekly, one scrolling episode at a time, and each one has to end on something that makes you come back. That's the same job an episode cliffhanger does. The rhythm transfers almost intact.
• The scares are storyboarded. Vertical scroll is a controlled reveal — the artist decides exactly how much blank space sits between you and the thing at the bottom of the panel. Directors get a shot list handed to them.
• The audience already exists and is loud about it. Millions of readers, a comment section full of receipts, and a built-in argument about whether the casting is right. Free marketing, high stakes.
• The concepts are strange. No network executive greenlights "monsters shaped by what people want most" from a cold pitch. A comic with 200 million views makes that conversation much shorter.

Korea figured out a decade before everyone else that the comics app is a development slate.

The gold rush is fully underway now — Naver Webtoon and Kakao are licensing IP to Hollywood at speed, a process laid out in After Solo Leveling, 5 Webtoons Poised to Become Warner Bros.' Next Billion-Dollar Franchises. Horror is a smaller slice of that pipeline than fantasy or romance, but it converts better than anything else. A manhwa horror drama has a fixed number of scares to land, and the comic already proved they land.

Ranked List

7. Duty After School (2023 · TVING) — from Duty After School by Ha Il-kwon (Naver Webtoon)

Premise: An enormous alien sphere parks itself over Korea and starts dropping things that kill people. The military runs out of soldiers, so the government drafts high school seniors — rifles, uniforms, and college credit for combat training taken during class hours. Class 2-3 keeps arguing about exams while learning to shoot.

The satire is savage and the kids die in ways that feel genuinely unfair, which is the entire point. It's split into two parts and the back half loses some grip, but nothing else on this list has a comparable stomach-drop at the halfway mark.

Webtoon vs drama: Ha Il-kwon's original is bleaker and funnier. The show softens a few endings.

6. Sweet Home (2020–2024 · Netflix) — from Sweet Home by Kim Carnby and Hwang Young-chan (Naver Webtoon)

Premise: Cha Hyun-su, a withdrawn teenager whose family died in a car crash, moves into a decaying apartment block called Green Home planning to end things. Then a plague arrives that turns people into monsters shaped by their strongest desire — a man obsessed with muscle becomes a slab of muscle, a starving woman becomes a mouth. The residents seal the doors and try to work out who among them is turning.

Season one is a genuine landmark for creature effects in Korean television. Seasons two and three drift, and I'd stop after the first if you're protective of your goodwill.

Webtoon vs drama: The comic goes considerably further into Hyun-su's head. The show trades that for spectacle.

5. Light Shop (2024 · Disney+ / Hulu) — from Light Shop by Kang Full (Kakao Webtoon)

Premise: Six strangers, each carrying something terrible from their past, keep finding themselves drawn to a lighting shop at the end of a dark alley in a neighborhood none of them can quite explain being in. The shopkeeper watches them closely. The question the show is actually asking is who these people are — and the answer reframes every scene before it.

Eight episodes, and it became the biggest Korean original premiere Disney+ had in 2024, which tells you the reveal works.

Webtoon vs drama: Kang Full wrote the script himself and has said the series diverges substantially from his 2011 comic, so reading first won't spoil you.

4. All of Us Are Dead (2022 · Netflix) — from Now at Our School by Joo Dong-geun (Naver Webtoon)

Premise: A science teacher at Hyosan High School engineers a virus to make his bullied son stronger. It escapes. Within hours the building is full of infected students, the doors are locked, the adults outside have written the school off, and a handful of teenagers are barricaded in a classroom with a fire hose and a stack of chairs.

Loud, gory, and much smarter about school hierarchy than a zombie show needs to be. Everyone in it is fifteen minutes away from being killed by someone they sat next to in homeroom.

Webtoon vs drama: The 2009–2011 original is grimmer and less romantic. The adaptation adds a lot of tenderness on purpose.

3. Save Me (2017 · OCN, Viki) — from Out of the World by Jo Geum-san (Naver Webtoon)

Premise: A family moves from Seoul to a small provincial town, where the father's business collapses and the son dies. Grieving and broke, the mother and daughter are absorbed by a local religious group that promises salvation and delivers total control. Trapped inside the compound, the daughter mouths one sentence through a car window to four local boys who used to bully her: save me.

This is the most quietly devastating show on the list — no monsters, no supernatural element, just the mechanics of how a family gets swallowed. Seo Ye-ji is remarkable in it.

Webtoon vs drama: The adaptation expands the four boys considerably. Worth it.

2. Hellbound (2021 · Netflix) — from Hellbound by Yeon Sang-ho and Choi Kyu-seok (Naver Webtoon)

Premise: People start receiving a "decree" — a spectral figure appears, names them, and states the exact second they will die. At that second, three enormous creatures show up in public and destroy them. A religious movement called the New Truth Society explains this as divine punishment for sin, gains enormous power, and starts deciding who deserves what.

The monsters are the least interesting part, deliberately. The horror is watching a frightened population hand its judgment over to whoever speaks with the most certainty.

Webtoon vs drama: Yeon Sang-ho directed his own comic, so the adaptation is unusually faithful — down to specific panel compositions.

1. Strangers from Hell (2019 · OCN, Netflix in select regions) — from Strangers from Hell by Kim Yong-ki (Naver Webtoon)

Premise: Yoon Jong-woo takes a job in Seoul and can only afford a room in Eden Studio, a goshiwon where the walls are thin, the shared bathroom has no lock, and the residents behave in ways he can't name as threatening but can't dismiss. One of them, a soft-spoken dentist named Seo Moon-jo, takes a particular interest in him. Jong-woo's grip on his own judgment comes apart in real time.

Still the best webtoon horror adaptation anyone has made, because it understood the source's actual subject: what cheap rent costs.

Webtoon vs drama: Kim Yong-ki's ending is nastier. The drama's is more ambiguous, and I prefer it.

Upcoming Webtoon-to-Drama Horror Adaptations to Watch For

• All of Us Are Dead, season two (Netflix). Filming wrapped in February 2026 and the show is in post-production, with On-jo now a college student facing a fresh outbreak in Seoul. It was absent from Netflix's announced 2026 Korean slate, so temper expectations toward 2027.
• Portraits of Delusion (Disney+). Based on Hongjacga's Naver webtoon, set in 1935, about a struggling painter commissioned to paint the reclusive owner of a mysterious hotel — a woman nobody has seen in fifty years, who appears not to have aged. Gothic rather than gory, with Bae Suzy and Kim Seon-ho.
• The reading-ahead pick. The Kakao Webtoon horror shelf is thinner than Naver's but deeper per title, and dark-fantasy IP with a fandom attached is what gets optioned first. Case in point: 5 Reasons to Read 7Fates: Chakho, the BTS Webtoon, If You Haven't Already — supernatural tiger hunters in a modern city, which is precisely the profile studios are hunting.

Read the comic first or after? After. The whole pleasure of a good adaptation is catching what the director decided you didn't need to see.