She Co-Wrote Kpop Demon Hunters While Quietly Coming Out as Bisexual. The Story She Was Telling Kept Turning into Her Own
Hannah McMechan is one of the screenwriters behind “KPop Demon Hunters,” the Netflix and Sony Pictures Animation film that became the most-watched original animated title in Netflix history, with more than 500 million views and four songs in the Billboard Hot 100 top 10 at once.
She joined the project in 2020, fresh out of Loyola Marymount, where she graduated in 2018. She grew up in Oakhurst, California, in a religious household. Over six years of development, the film and her own life moved in parallel.
The movie follows Huntr/x, a K-pop girl group who secretly hunt demons. The lead, Rumi, hides that she’s half-demon, convinced that if anyone saw the whole of her, she couldn’t be loved. Audiences read it as a queer allegory. McMechan was living a version of it.
She came out during the pandemic, telling friends first. In a June 2026 People interview, she described the earliest days of accepting it: “I’m not telling anyone this, and I don’t even want to accept this to be true.” She’s been with her partner for about four years.
Coming out to her parents in 2023 was harder. “It was really difficult. My experience was honestly from the 1980s. It was not fun. They’re still trying to accept it and still asking if I’m still queer, because they think it’s a phase.”
That’s the ache underneath the scene where Rumi confronts her adoptive mother, Celine, and asks why she won’t love all of her. McMechan wrote toward a feeling she was living through, without naming it to anyone on the project.
The film found the people she was writing for anyway. “There’s no group of people happier than a bunch of queer people dressed up as these girls.”
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