Light Shop

About this title

A mystery horror drama about a light shop that opens every night deep inside an alley and the strangers who cross paths around it, Light Shop is an eight-episode Disney+ Original that Kang Full adapted himself from his webtoon of the same name, and actor Kim Hee-won's directorial debut.

Disney+ released episodes 1–4 of the eight-episode series all at once on December 4, 2024, then two episodes a week over the next two weeks, with the final episode arriving on December 18. The Disney+ Korea page rates it 15+ and carries a notice that some flashing-light sequences may affect viewers who are sensitive to light. The source is Kang Full's webtoon of the same title, serialized on Daum Webtoon in 2011, and it is the fifth entry in his "mystery psychological chiller" series, a line that runs through works such as Apartment and Timing. When Disney+ announced the release date in October 2024, it put the webtoon's cumulative views at 150 million. At a local press event during Disney Content Showcase 2024 in Singapore that November, Kang said that, like his earlier series Moving, this drama is set in 2018.

Kim Hee-won is an actor whose credits include the film The Man from Nowhere and the series Misaeng: Incomplete Life, and in Moving (2023), which Kang also wrote, he played Choi Il-hwan, a homeroom teacher at Jeongwon High School. It was Kang who first asked him to direct. Kang said that because the story needed to focus on people, he wanted a director who could draw out the actors' performances, and that it took him a month to persuade Kim, who at the time was preparing to direct a horror short film. Kim admitted that even after saying yes, he spent about two months wondering whether to tell Kang he was backing out. Kang wrote the scripts himself, as he had for Moving, making this his second drama screenplay. The series was produced by Mr. Romance and Moving Pictures Company.

Ju Ji-hoon plays Won-young, the owner who keeps watch over the light shop at the end of the alley, and Park Bo-young plays Young-ji, a nurse who works night shifts in a university hospital's intensive care unit. In episode 1, "Strangers," Hyun-min (Uhm Tae-goo) grows curious about Ji-young (Kim Seol-hyun), a woman he keeps running into at the same bus stop every night. High school student Hyun-joo (Shin Eun-soo) stops by the shop almost every day to buy light bulbs on errands for her mother, Yu-hee (Lee Jung-eun), and the owner tells her that if she meets anyone strange in the alley, she should pretend not to see them. In episode 2, "The Door," screenwriter Seon-hae (Kim Min-ha) moves into an old ground-floor house with bars on its windows, starts hearing someone sing in the alley every night, and meets Ji-ung (Kim Ki-hae), the high school student who has been singing. Park Hyuk-kwon plays Seung-won, who wanders the alley soaking wet; Kim Sun-hwa plays Hye-won, who wears red shoes; and Bae Seong-woo plays the detective Sung-sik. Kim Dae-myung also appears.

At the launch press conference, Kim said he shot the series with a point midway between reality and fantasy in mind. In an interview after the release, he explained that he had stripped away as much of the script's weightier content as possible and changed the genre from episode to episode, unfolding episode 1 like a mystery and giving episode 2 strong horror traits. Kang said there was a lot he could not convey through drawings in the webtoon, but that the director and actors let him express more in the drama, and he described the work as both horror and melodrama. Kim Seol-hyun, who plays Ji-young, recalled that it was her first time adopting an eerie tone for a role. Disney+ announced that, based on global viewing over the first 12 days after release, the series was the most-watched Korean original released in 2024 and ranked second among Korean originals released since Disney+ launched. The series earned Kim Hee-won a nomination for Best Director in the Broadcasting category at the 61st Baeksang Arts Awards in 2025, and at the Global OTT Awards of the International Streaming Festival that same year, Kang was nominated for Best Writer and the series for Best Visual Effects.

See alsoMoving 2023The Witch 2025Late Blossom 2012

Drama Lineup editors · Fact-checked against: m.entertain.naver.com, newsseoul.co.kr, enews.imbc.com, etnews.com, nocutnews.co.kr, news.tf.co.kr, munhwa.com, kisf.kr, v.daum.net, disneyplus.com, en.wikipedia.org · 2026-10-18