Cheon Yeo-ri has money, a hotel, and a problem no board meeting can solve. She sees the dead. Not all of them, and not the peaceful ones, but the people who died unjustly, who arrive at the foot of her bed and refuse to be ignored. For most of her life the gift has been a private siege, something to survive quietly behind a heiress’s composure. Spooky in Love opens on the moment she stops hiding it and starts using it, and on the man who will have to decide whether standing beside her is worth standing beside them.

The series is a horror romantic comedy, a form Korean television has spent a decade refining, and it is built on a deceptively simple pairing. Yeo-ri, played by Park Eun-bin, is a chaebol heiress and hotel CEO who can see spirits. Ma Gang-uk, played by Yang Se-jong, is a prosecutor who reopens unsolved murder cases and is privately terrified of exactly what she perceives. She has the witnesses no court can call. He has the authority to act on what they say. The romance is the negotiation between those two facts, and the negotiation is with fear itself.

The show’s defining choice sits in its source. Spooky in Love is a series remake of Spellbound, the 2011 film by Hwang In-ho, and the interesting problem is arithmetic. A film gives you one couple, one arc, roughly two hours to decide whether fear or affection wins. A twelve-episode weekend drama has to keep that decision alive far longer. Choi Jung-mi’s script solves it by turning the heroine’s curse into a case structure: each spirit that visits Yeo-ri is someone with an unfinished story, and each unfinished story is a case Gang-uk can chase. The film’s single question becomes a serial engine.

The original film was a two-hander that used its ghosts sparingly, as the reason a man kept his distance from a woman he was falling for. Serialization inverts the economy. Where the film could afford to keep the supernatural mostly off-screen, a weekend drama has to put a new spirit in the room often enough to power an episode, and it has to do so without letting the scares swamp the love story or the love story flatten the scares. That is the tightrope Spooky in Love has chosen to walk for two months of Saturdays and Sundays.

That structure changes what the ghosts are for. They are not there to make the audience jump. They are complainants. The specificity of the premise quietly rewires a familiar setup, because she does not see the dead in general, she sees the ones who were wronged. Master’s Sun gave its heroine ghosts who wanted comfort. Spooky in Love gives its heroine ghosts who want a verdict. Pairing her with a prosecutor makes the occult procedural literal: the dead get an advocate, and the advocate gets evidence he could never otherwise reach.

Park Eun-bin arrives off the run that turned Extraordinary Attorney Woo into a global title, and the casting is pointed. An actress known for playing a mind that processes the world differently now plays a woman who simply sees more of it than anyone around her. Yang Se-jong, whose earlier turns in Doctor John and Temperature of Love traded on a certain guarded warmth, works against her as the skeptic whose fear, not the ghosts, is the real obstacle. Ong Seong-wu, as Kang Min-hwan, adds a second pressure point to the central geometry so the story has somewhere to bend. The comedy lives in the gap between what Yeo-ri knows and what Gang-uk will admit.

Twelve hours of television also buy something the film could not afford: interiority. A feature has to establish the fear and resolve it inside a single sitting, which means the man’s terror is mostly a plot obstacle. A season can let it breathe, can show why a prosecutor who chases the dead for a living cannot bear to see them, can trace how a woman learns to trust that someone will still be there in the morning after she has described what stood in the corner all night. The romance earns its beats by accumulation rather than declaration.

Tone is the hard part in a package like this, and the trailers suggest the production knows it. The dread is kept in reserve rather than spent early; the comedy carries the romance while the casework carries the stakes. A hotel is a useful engine for that balance, a place where strangers check in carrying histories no one asks about, and where a woman who can read the room in the most literal sense has an advantage and a burden at once. The glossy surface is not the point. It is the frame that lets the darker material land without curdling.

Korean drama has long used the ghost-seeing heroine to talk about something other than horror: loneliness, class, the cases the system never closed. Spooky in Love inherits that lineage and sharpens it toward justice. A culture with a long public memory for unresolved crimes and institutional failure gets a fantasy in which the unresolved literally will not stay buried, and a prosecutor who, for once, has to listen to the people a courtroom could never put on a stand.

There is a reason a package like this lands on Netflix the same night it airs in Seoul. The occult-plus-romance combination travels; the procedural spine gives a global audience a reason to return week to week rather than sampling one episode and drifting. For CJ ENM, a weekend tentpole simulcast worldwide is a bet that a Korean genre hybrid can hold an international room, and the specificity of the premise is what makes that bet interesting rather than generic. This is not a mood piece exported for atmosphere. It is a story with a case to solve.

Which leaves the question the premise cannot answer and the romance cannot escape. If loving Yeo-ri means loving the whole crowd she carries, the grievances, the unfinished business, the nightly reminder that some deaths never get repaired, then intimacy here is not an escape from fear. It is an agreement to live inside it. The warmth the show promises is real. So is the thing it refuses to send away.

The slot itself carries expectations. tvN’s Saturday-Sunday berth has housed some of Korean television’s most exportable romances, and audiences arrive at it primed for a certain gloss and a certain emotional payoff. Spooky in Love is betting that a genre hybrid can meet those expectations while smuggling in a harder idea, that a crowd-pleasing weekend drama can also be a show about who gets remembered and who gets forgotten. Whether the two halves hold together is the thing to watch across its twelve weeks.

Spooky in Love is a tvN weekend drama directed by Lee Min-soo, running twelve episodes across Saturdays and Sundays from July 18 to August 23, 2026. Globally it streams on Netflix, simulcast with the Korean broadcast, with Park Eun-bin, Yang Se-jong and Ong Seong-wu leading and CJ ENM Studios producing.