Sweet Home is returning to our screens after three long years of waiting. Now’s the time to get a refresher on everything that went down to prepare ourselves for what’s coming next. Sometimes you just forget how gorey and sad a show is until you rewatch it much later. Sweet Home specifically had so much to offer, not just in terms of a horror show, but psychologically and visually. It’s a full package that keeps you glued to the screen from start to finish. To add to the thrill, it’s a survival show, and no one is safe, so it’s better not to have favorites. In this listicle, we’ll try and rank the many disturbing monsters we got to see in Sweet Home season 1 based on their strength, desires, and survival skills. These monsters were all humans at some point, and the show beautifully uses the desires of the human to come up with the monstrosity of the person. Sweet Home is based on a webtoon of the same name, which is just as immensely popular as the show. It’s important to remember that all the monsters are manifestations of their human desires.
13. Gooey Monster
Starting with what we can only call adorable, the gooey monster is a child who liked to play hide and seek in his human form. In slime form, he can hide in small places, sliding through the smallest of cracks. He had to see his mother die at the hands of a monster in front of his eyes, which is probably why he became slime and started to hide from other monsters. Unfortunately, this harmless monster was killed off despite little Yeong-Su’s protest.
12. Baby Monster
No, not the K-pop group that just debuted; this is the sweet lady who lost her one-year-old baby and ended up becoming a gigantic womb with a baby inside. Her only desire was to have her baby back, and she’s finally reunited with it as a monster. She doesn’t harm anyone, and in fact, before turning fully, just like Hyun-Su, she manages to hold on to the protein monster for some time in order to save the kids and help the others. Myung-Sook was a kindhearted person, and so she ended up becoming a harmless monster. She used to bring an empty stroller everywhere, even after her baby died. There’s nothing further to be said.
11. Reach Monster
This monster was another one of the residents of the apartment who lost his son to one of the other monsters. He wasn’t able to save his son, and his only desire was to hold his hand, as the other residents learned from his notebook. He didn’t have the chance to reach his son in time, being too slow to hold his hand before he was probably snatched away, possibly by the speed monster or the spider monster, who are both very fast.
10. Eye-Ball Monster
This is one of the monsters we don’t know the origin of. We can assume that this person’s desire as a human being was to spy on people or peep into people’s homes (e.g., peeping Tom). He has a really long stem for his neck, which kind of looks like an ostrich’s that is able to wind and glide like a snake. It seems at first that this monster isn’t really keen on hurting anyone and might just want to be a creep, but when Hyun-Su fights him, the neck wraps around him like a snake, squeezing him until Du-Sik saves Hyun-Su by shooting the monster. At that point, we get to see that the rest of the monster’s body is pretty much a man.
9. Hair Monster
The most despicable character in Sweet Home Season 1, Kim Seok-Hyun, is a grocery store owner who is a terrible husband. He beats up his wife, despite everyone’s distaste for it, and treats her like garbage. The short little guy clearly had an inferiority complex, which made him hate his wife further and be aggressive towards other people as a human. He wouldn’t even let them eat from his grocery store for free when there was a literal state of emergency. We can imagine his biggest desire is to be respected by his peers and the residents. From the start, he tries to take charge, but a man half his age manages to do it much more skillfully. Seok-Hyun used to wear a wig because he had no hair, probably because it meant he would get some respect and be desirable (yuck), so eventually, he turned into a big blob of hair. Ultimately, he apologizes to his wife before she kills him.
8. Starving Monster
When rewatching this, it’s interesting to note the uncanny resemblance between the scene with the starving monster and the mother in Evil Dead Rise. The first monster Hyun-Su encounters is this monster, whom he sees eating her own cat (yikes). In human form, she had wanted to be an actress, so she was always hungry thanks to all the dieting (Korean beauty standards are no joke, TT). When you’re hungry, you lose appetite for life too, and it’s possible this is why her desire manifested into a hunger for everything. In appearance, she looks like a skeletal figure, almost as if she finally got to the size she needed to be, with really sharp teeth to eat everything she wanted.
7. Fly Monster
The security guard of the building used to have to do odd jobs, as we learn when he meets Hyun-Su for the first time. He was weeding the garden when Hyun-Su moved in, and as a monster, he has that same device that he carries around to chop up people. This man definitely held a lot of resentment for the residents of the building because they made him do everything. Before it all begins, one of the residents hands him a box of fish as a present, but they’re swarmed with flies as they’re long-rotten. Supposedly, this is based on a post on the Korean version of Reddit that sparked a conversation about how people hand over expired foods to security guards. This was when he became a monster, and so he had the desire to hurt the residents of the building to get his revenge, specifically the fish “ajumma.”
6. Tongue Monster
The tongue monster is one of the creepiest of the lot, for certain. It looks like he’s wearing hospital clothes, so we can assume he was sick at some point before he got sick enough to become a monster. This monster has a long, trunk-like tongue that he uses to suck the life out of people. Considering he’s in patient attire, we can assume his desire was to live. But, of course, there has to be some kind of negativity attached to this, and it’s possible the man became jealous of people with good health and lives, so he turned into a weird version of the dementors. On the other hand, with his large size and mouth that opens wide enough to consume a whole person, it’s possible that even when he was well, the man was like a leech who always took from others, draining them of their goodness.
5. Lotus Root Monster
Yeah, this monster does have the strangest name, but it’s because of how the inside of his head looks once Jae-Heon cuts it in half (the lotus root will never be the same again). In his human form, this man could easily blend into a crowd of Korean working-class people. His disdain is for his manager, who may have asked too much of him or bullied him, as they commonly do. This monster is a jab at the Korean hierarchical system that allows those in senior positions to exploit their juniors with no consequences. The man probably held back so much that the second he became a monster, he only had the desire to kill people. Specifically, it’s the desire to kill his manager, who framed him for something he didn’t do and left him for the dirt. In appearance, he looks like a weird, skinny troll with stone and ash-like skin. Because he becomes blind, his hearing abilities improve tenfold in order to help him kill people.
4. Protein Monster
This one is the largest monster we came across in Sweet Home Season 1. He was definitely a “gym bro” as a human being who only cared about packing on muscle and getting bulked up. Kids, it’s good to be physically fit, but this is a bit much. The monster keeps repeating the word “protein”; we suppose human beings are protein to him. This monster has super strength and crushes anyone who gets in his way, where he’s headed? Nobody knows. The protein monster is humongous, tall enough to easily stand in front of a firetruck and tower over it, and has a hunched back with steel-like muscles from top to bottom. This monster does not feel pain anywhere (I guess steroids are good for one thing).
3. Speed Monster
The speed monster is another one we don’t know anything about. He has a humanoid form, but with what we can only describe as fiery horse legs. The speed monster must have been an aspiring athlete who only ever wanted to be fast. He’s one of the most violent monsters of the lot, and it’s possible that he was too obsessed with his career as a human, which is why he became so beastly later on. Ah, just become a monster if you want lightning-fast speed.
2. Spider Monster
This has got to be one of the most disgusting and realistic-looking monsters out of the lot. Supposedly, this monster is inspired by the tentacle monster in the webtoon, which would’ve been much harder to recreate, for sure. The spider monster had the desire to be Spider-Man. Just kidding. All we can do is assume with this one, because we only get to see the abilities of this monster. It’s super-fast, stealthy, and traps its prey in webs. Its legs are also capable of piercing into human flesh like a fork in steak. Maybe this monster wanted to trap others as humans, or maybe it was a loan shark (oh how the Koreans love their loan sharks) and they scammed people to trap them into paying them for life.
1. The Sludge Monster
The Sludge Monster has got to be the most intriguing of the monsters because, just like the protagonist, Hyun-Su, he is able to hold his own as a human being as well. What Ui-Myeong (the human form the sludge monster has taken over) believes is that he has been chosen by the almighty to be a more advanced being and take over the world (or at least Korea). Already, he’s a gang member, so we can assume his great desire is power itself. This man is so powerful as a monster that he’s capable of turning other monsters into his subordinates to do his bidding. Unfortunately, this is how the apartment people lose the nice woman, Seon-Yeong, Seok-Hyun’s wife. We were only hoping she would turn out like Hyun-Su. Ui-Myeong is, according to the army, he’s a special patient.
Which of these monsters would you like to see fighting each other? We would’ve loved to see the speed monster and the protein monster face-off.
