Inside the 'real Squid Game' - barbaric Brothers' Home where hundreds were tortured to death
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Fans have been gripped by the second season of Squid Game, which sees previous winner Seong Gi-hun - Player 456 - (Lee Jung-jae) return to the secretive contest - this time under no illusion about just how brutal things would get. And those tuning in have spotted disturbing parallels with an all-too-real horror story. The South Korean series, created for Netflix by screenwriter and director Hwang Dong-hyuk, centres around a savage competition in which down-on-their-luck contestants battle it out throughout a series of deceptively innocent-looking children's games for a shot at winning a life-changing sum of money.
Those who slip up are gunned down without mercy by masked guards while a group of wealthy men known as the 'VIPs' watch on, placing sick bets on the players as though they were watching a horse race. The blood-soaked show is meant to illustrate the stark differences between rich and poor, taken to dystopian extremes.
However, a number of fans have noted stark similarities between Squid Game and a truly harrowing series of events that unfolded in South Korea in the '70s and '80s. From 1976 to 1987, the sinister 'Brothers' Home' operated in Busan, South Korea - and the deceptively welcoming name still strikes fear into the hearts of those who managed to survive. The diabolical facility was the largest and most notorious of 36 detention facilities set up to "cleanse" South Korea's streets of "symbols of the poverty and disorder of cities", with then-President Chun Doo-Hwan ordering a tougher approach to begging.
