The viral claim that Squid Game was based on a real South Korean internment camp has circulated widely online. Here is what actually happened at Brothers Home and what the show’s creator really says about his inspiration.
If you have spent any time online since Squid Game became a global phenomenon, you have almost certainly come across the claim: that the Netflix series was inspired by a real event in South Korean history known as the Brothers Home incident a story so dark, so disturbing, and so stranger-than-fiction that the connection seemed almost too obvious to ignore.
But is it true? The answer is more complicated and more interesting than a simple yes or no.
WHAT WAS BROTHERS HOME?
To understand the claim, you first need to understand what Brothers Home actually was because the reality of it is genuinely shocking.
Brothers Home, known in Korean as Hyungje Bokjiwon, was an internment facility located in the southern port city of Busan, South Korea. It began in the early 1960s as an orphanage but gradually transformed into something far more sinister throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
On the surface, it was presented by the South Korean government as a social welfare centre a place to shelter and rehabilitate homeless people and vagrants. In reality, it was, according to a 2022 report by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a site of systematic and state-sanctioned human rights abuse on a horrifying scale.
The context matters. South Korea in the early 1980s was a country under authoritarian rule, governed by President Chun Doo-hwan, a former general who had seized power in a military coup. With the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Seoul Olympics approaching, the government was determined to present a clean, modern image of the country to the international community. That meant, among other things, getting “undesirables” off the streets.
In 1981, President Chun ordered measures to crack down on begging and remove vagrants from public spaces. What followed was a systematic roundup of people from the streets of South Korean cities not just homeless individuals, but ordinary citizens who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fewer than ten percent of those sent to Brothers Home were actually homeless, according to a 1987 investigation by local prosecutors. The facility’s operators were financially incentivised to bring in as many people as possible the more inmates they housed, the more government subsidies they received.
WHAT HAPPENED INSIDE
Brothers Home was run by Park In-geun, a convicted criminal and former soldier who operated the facility with what investigators later described as an army-like chain of command. Between 1975 and 1988, an estimated 40,000 individuals passed through its gates. The facility contained 20 factories where inmates were forced to produce goods including clothing, fishing equipment, footwear, and handicrafts products that were exported to Japan and Europe, generating substantial revenue for the facility’s management while the workers received nothing.
Those who failed to complete their assigned tasks faced brutal punishment. A strict hierarchy existed inside the facility, with certain inmates elevated to positions of authority over others a system that incentivised collaboration with the guards and created layers of control that made resistance extremely difficult.
Survivors who later came forward described conditions of extreme deprivation, violence, and abuse. Several hundred bones were found on the former site in the 1990s after the facility had closed. The 2022 Truth and Reconciliation Commission report concluded that 657 people died inside Brothers Home between 1975 and 1988. Many survivors and advocates believe the true death toll is significantly higher. South Korean media have since referred to the facility as “Korea’s Auschwitz.”
When the scandal began to surface in the late 1980s largely due to the persistent efforts of survivors and the families of those detained Park In-geun was investigated and prosecuted. He received a sentence of just two and a half years in prison, not for the abuse and deaths inside the facility, but for embezzling government subsidies. He was released in 1989 and almost immediately returned to the social welfare business. He later emigrated to Australia, where he established a church in Sydney using money embezzled from the Brothers Home Foundation.
Survivors spent decades fighting to have the truth officially acknowledged. One survivor, Hahn Jong-seon, staged a lone year-long protest outside South Korea’s National Assembly, holding a placard detailing the abuse he endured alongside a photograph of himself at the age of nine. His persistence, and the persistence of many other survivors and human rights advocates, eventually helped bring the case to national and international attention. The South Korean government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission finally completed its formal investigation in 2022 decades after the facility closed.
—
SO WAS SQUID GAME BASED ON THIS?
Here is where the viral claim runs into the facts.
Squid Game’s creator, Hwang Dong-hyuk, has been clear and consistent about where his inspiration came from and it was not Brothers Home. In interviews, Hwang has explained that the idea for Squid Game originated during his own personal financial crisis around 2008 and 2009, when a failed film project left him struggling with debt alongside his mother and grandmother. During that difficult period, he spent time in South Korean manga cafes reading Japanese survival manga, particularly Battle Royale, Liar Game, and Gambling Apocalypse: Kaiji stories about desperate people forced into high-stakes games with lethal consequences.
Hwang found those stories deeply resonant with his own situation at the time. As he explained in an interview, reading about indebted characters entering life-or-death games felt immersive to him precisely because he was himself struggling financially. He decided to write a Korean survival game story of his own, grounding it not in elaborate intellectual puzzles but in the simple childhood games he had grown up playing games that every Korean would recognise and feel immediately connected to.
There is no confirmed connection, and no statement from Hwang Dong-hyuk or Netflix, linking Squid Game to the Brothers Home incident. The show’s thematic DNA comes from Japanese manga, South Korean childhood culture, and Hwang’s personal experience of economic hardship not from the events at the Busan internment facility.
