K-drama Sell Your Haunted House: Jang Na-ra shines in exorcism-themed comedy-drama

An exorcist and a con man, who turns out to be a psychic, work together to clear buildings haunted by spirits with tragic backstories that must be unravelled

Jang Na-ra shines as the cool exorcist with a penchant for fried chicken and shopping in a show full of easy-going charms and familiar episodic stories

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Jang Na-ra in a still from Sell Your Haunted House. Jang shines in this series that’s full of easy-going charms and familiar episodic stories.

Published: 7:15pm, 27 Apr 2021Updated: 8:40pm, 27 Apr 2021

Comedy, drama and the occult collide in Sell Your Haunted House, a new TV series from South Korean channel KBS2 starring Jang Na-ra and Jung Yong-hwa. The premise is simple: an exorcist works as a property agent, clearing buildings haunted by spirits with a grudge so that they may then be sold at market price.

The exorcist is called Hong Ji-a (Jang) and the name of her operation is Great Real Estate – also the Korean name of the show. She runs the business on the first floor of the building with the help of Joo Hwa-jung (Kang Mal-geum), who handles the business side, and she lives upstairs, where she indulges in television shopping – a habit she still gets nagged at about by her mother. Well, not nagged so much as harshly stared at by the ghost of her mother, who died 20 years ago.

Ji-a works at night and dresses in an all-black, quasi-goth get-up, wearing any one of the dozens of impulsively bought pairs of black boots that she owns – she swears they’re all different. She can feel and see spirits and after giving chase, she traps them in a force field with the help of an instrument that would best be described as a supernatural nail gun.

However, for the crucial last step she needs help – someone to be possessed by the ghost. For this she employs young “psychics”, who are paid very handsomely to be possessed, at which point the ghost will fight with the well-trained Ji-a, until she stabs them with a supernatural bineo (a traditional Korean hairpin), thus releasing their spirit from the mortal world.

She recruits these psychics by making them step over a bowl of rice. If the rice glows blue – only shamans can see this – they have the ability to be possessed by spirits. She also subjects them to a second test, of walking up the stairs to her flat. The young men invariably fail, making it only a few steps before losing consciousness, and we learn that Ji-a needs a particularly strong psychic to help her mother pass on to the afterworld.