Ji-ah and In-bum on their way to another satisfied customer
Sell Your Haunted House (대박부동산; Daebak Budong San) is a 2021 Korean Series starring Jang Na-ra, Jung Yong-hwa, Kang Mal-geum, Kang Hong-seok and Ahn Gil-kang.
Hong Ji-ah is the owner of Daebak Realty, a real estate agency running on a unique business model. Her customers are the owners of haunted houses who are unable to sell their property. Ji-ah exorcises the ghost, sells the property at market price and receives the commission. The last of a line of female exorcists, Ji-ah leads a lonely existence, accompanied only by her partner and secretary Joo Hwa-jung and the restless ghost of her mother, who died during a botched exorcism while Ji-ah was still a young girl.
Her routine is interrupted when she encounters Oh In-bum, a petty conman who scams the rich and clueless with fake hauntings. It quickly turns out that In-bum unknowingly possesses an unusually strong psychic ability, which Ji-ah hopes may help her finally exorcise her mother. Together, they struggle against various ghosts and the cutthroat world of Korean real estate.
No relation to the novel How to Sell a Haunted House.
Sell Your Haunted House contains examples of:
- Accidental Murder:
- Oh Sung-sik agreed to burn down some derelict buildings on behalf of Do Hak-sung. Unfortunately, he failed to check they were empty, and seven people died as a result.
- Ji-ah attempted to exorcise a ghost from her mother’s body, knowing that stabbing the possessed person is harmless to the host. She didn’t know that this does not apply when egg ghosts are involved.
- Action Girl: Ji-ah is so proficient in hand-to-hand combat that hardened criminals are seriously afraid of her.
- All Women Love Shoes: Ji-ah has many pairs of black boots, and can’t resist buying more.
- And I Must Scream: Ji-ah decides that a simple exorcism is too good for Do Hak-sung’s spirit, and elects to seal him instead in a jug where he will suffer excruciating torment forever.
- And the Adventure Continues: The end of the series sees our team back at Daebak Realty and more successful than ever.
- Big Bad: Almost everything bad that ever happened in the main plot can be traced back to Do Hak-sung.
- Big Eater: Ji-ah usually orders enough food for five people, and her eating style is described as “inhaling”.
- Brought Down to Normal: After sealing away Do Hak-sung, Ji-ah loses her exorcist powers (the potential backlash from this procedure is why it isn’t usually done).
- Catapult Nightmare: In-bum has a few when dealing with the memories of exorcised ghosts.
- The Confidant: Hwa-jung is the only person Ji-ah feels she can fully trust. Unsurprisingly, she feels incredibly betrayed when she discovers Hwa-jung has been hiding the truth about her mother’s death.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Do Hak-sung is a corrupt real estate mogul.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Well, everyone (except maybe Ji-chul).
- Ji-ah lost her mother in violent circumstances as a child.
- In-bum’s parents died in an accident when he was still a baby. The uncle who raised him died in an apparent suicide, and his only remaining relative, his grandmother, blamed him for all the misfortune that befell their family as a way to vent her own grief and despair. He ran away from home as soon as he finished school.
- Hwa-jung became pregnant while still a teenager and had to work a number of jobs to support herself and her child. She was then forced to leave the baby alone for a few hours, resulting in the latter’s death, and was accused of her murder – which she confessed to due to her own guilt.
- Dead All Along: Some ghosts don’t know they’re dead, such as the elderly homeowner in episode 4.
- Deceased Parents Are the Best:
- In-bum’s parents died when he was very young, and he was raised by his uncle and later grandmother.
- Ji-ah’s mother is also dead (although still around) and her father is never mentioned.
- Defrosting Ice Queen: Ji-ah has every appearance of being an Emotionless Girl, but gradually thaws over the course of the series.
- Demonic Possession: Almost all exorcisms require this, with the ghost sucked into the body of a suitable medium and disposed of via a stab to the heart with a specially-prepared hairpin (thankfully, this doesn’t usually harm the living host).
- Distressed Dude: In-bum has to be saved by Ji-ah quite a few times.
- The Faceless: People possessed by an egg ghost lose their facial features for the duration of the possession.
- Family of Choice: A running theme.
- Friend on the Force: Detective Jung for Hwa-jung. While initially very skeptical of their endeavors, Detective Kang later develops this relationship with both Hwa-jung and Ji-ah.
- Ghostly Chill: A localized version. Ji-ah knows that there’s a ghost nearby when her body temperature suddenly drops, signified by a cloud of mist coming out of her mouth. The longer she spends near the ghost, the more she is in danger of hypothermia.
- Glowing Eyes: Ji-ah’s eyes glow when she is looking for ghosts and when she absorbs an exorcised ghost’s memory. The latter also happens to In-bum.
- Gratuitous English: Hwa-jung's use of random English expressions verges on a Verbal Tic.
- Hypno Pendulum: Played for laughs. In-bum attempts to hypnotize Ji-ah with a pocket watch in order to help her restore her powers, but somehow manages only to affect Ji-chul who is sitting in the background.
- "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: Ji-ah has one with In-bum while he is possessed by Do Hak-sung’s spirit and strangling her. He does manage to regain control for a few seconds, which is enough for her to break free and turn the tables on Do.
- I Know Your True Name: Writing down the ghost’s full name is an essential part of the exorcism process. Becomes especially important while exorcising the egg ghost, since it turns out it is necessary to use the names of all the people who died to create it in order to avoid killing the medium.
- Jade-Colored Glasses: After years of dealing with the restless spirits of the wronged and murdered, Ji-ah has developed a bad case of this.
- Jump Scare: Quite a few, as expected from a show about ghosts. Less typically, sometimes played for dark comedy with Ji-ah’s mother, who tends to appear suddenly and creepily to stop her daughter from boozing up or spending too much money on shoes.
- Karmic Death: Do Hak-sung slips down a staircase and breaks his neck while trying to escape from a group of homeless people he violently provoked, getting covered with the money he was planning to use in his getaway for good measure. Detective Kang straight out calls it karma.
- Long-Distance Relationship: Ji-chul is in one with a girl he met online. Just as they finally meet face-to-face, she gets entangled in an incident with the ghost of murder victim and eventually decides to attend the Police Academy, so they’re forced to do long-distance again.
- Loss of Identity: Ji-ah mentions this as a risk of absorbing ghosts' memories: over time, if you are not careful, you can forget where the memories and emotions of the deceased end and you begin.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: The egg ghost in Sky Building briefly does this to Ji-ah with an illusion of a world where her mother is alive, Hwa-jung, In-bum and Ji-chul are her family and ghosts aren’t even real. It’s an attempt to make her take off her protective necklace, and she sees through it pretty quickly.
- Lovable Rogue: In-bum and Ji-chul are a pair of conmen, but lovable nonetheless.
- The Mole: After losing his standing in the criminal world, Tae-jin pretends to go over to the good guys' side, but really spies on them in a bid to get back into Do Hak-sung’s good graces. He does a real Heel–Face Turn eventually.
- My Greatest Failure: Ji-ah blames herself for the death of her mother. The fact that her mother still hangs around as a silent reminder sure doesn’t help. Finding out that she killed her mother herself helps even less.
- Never Suicide: Oh Sung-sik’s death was ruled a suicide, but his mother is convinced that it he could never have done it. She’s right.
- Non-Action Guy: When not possessed, In-bum isn’t exactly physically imposing and leaves the fighting to Ji-ah.
- Not-So-Phony Psychic: In-bum scams people by pretending to be a parapsychologist who can rid their homes of hauntings (which he engineers himself). After encountering Ji-ah, it turns out he has very real psychic powers.
- Only Sane Man: Joo Hwa-jung seems to be the most well-adjusted of the main cast, serving as Ji-ah’s confidant and dealing with the more sociable side of doing business.
- Protective Charm: The blue salt pendants that protect mediums (and exorcists, if necessary) from possession.
- Secret Government Warehouse: In the finale, Hwa-jung deposits the jar containing Do Hak-sung’s ghost in a mysterious storage guarded by women wearing suits and exorcist hairpins. We’re not told exactly what it is, but is certainly has the vibe.
- Significant Wardrobe Shift: Flashbacks show Ji-ah wearing pink in her younger days, with the trademark all-black wardrobe developing to signify her increasingly cynical and jaded attitude.
- Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: The standard look for most female ghosts.
- 10-Minute Retirement: After finding out the truth about her mother’s death, Ji-ah has a major Heroic BSoD and decides to quit her job as an exorcist. This holds for about two days until someone she knows needs her help again.
- Together in Death: Oh Sung-sik welcomes his mother into the afterlife.
- Unfinished Business:
- Unusually for this trope, our heroes mostly resolve this after sending the aggrieved ghost to the hereafter, not as a method of doing so. The only exception is the ghost of the child in episode 8, who leaves on her own after fulfilling her goal of saying goodbye to her mother.
- Late in the series, it turns out that some ghosts which are particularly hard to exorcise, such as Ji-ah’s mother, are tethered to Earth by the guilt of a living relative. In this case, the living are those with unresolved issues preventing their loved ones from moving on.
- Unreliable Narrator: Ji-ah’s memories of the night her mother died turn out to be extremely inaccurate. She largely suppressed and distorted the chain of events to avoid confronting her guilt about what really happened.
- Virgin Power: Successful mediums are always male virgins – something about untainted Yang energy being necessary to attract ghosts, which are composed mainly of Yin energy. In-bum is very unhappy when this is brought up.
- Walking Wasteland: An egg ghost causes a low-key version of this effect, making people around it die in various ways until its grievance is satisfied and it disappears. The phenomenon is described as more akin to a natural disaster than anything human.
- Who You Gonna Call?: Daebak Realty!
- Willing Channeler: To a given extent of “willing”, but part of the exorcism process involves a medium allowing the spirit to possess him.
- Would Hurt a Child: A semi-heroic example. Hong Mi-jin was planning to kill young In-bum to destroy the egg ghost possessing him and then turn herself in.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Do Hak-sung's general philosophy of HR management. Shockingly, this does not inspire much loyalty in his underlings.
