I have been watching 사마귀: 살인자의 외출, and it has completely taken over my thoughts, and it’s exactly why I’ve started searching for more K-dramas like Queen Mantis to fill the same void. Jung Yi-shin isn’t just another fictional killer; she’s a character who lingers long after the screen fades to black. I’ll be in the middle of something ordinary business and suddenly her words echo back, cold and deliberate, reminding me how easily she bends Cha Su-yeol to her will. Their dynamic has become an obsession, a reminder that the scariest monsters are sometimes the ones bound to you by blood.
With only two episodes left, the tension has been refined into a virtually intolerable state. Go Hyun-jung has made Jung Yi-shin irreplaceable as a chilly, calculating, exploitative but oddly mesmerising woman, and Jang Dong-yoon’s Cha Su-yeol self-destructs as a result of the pressures of living as her son. Watching him rage against her and yet remain controlled by her is like beholding a psychological trap from which he cannot escape. It’s a war of hatred and loyalty, which becomes more claustrophobic with each succeeding instalment.
And that’s the real reason Kdramas similar to Queen Mantis are so addictive: they don’t just thrill us with murders and mysteries, they gut us with intimate betrayals. This isn’t only a crime story; it’s a family tragedy. It asks what happens when maternal love twists into control, when survival means questioning whether you’ve inherited the very darkness you’re trying to escape. That combination of psychological suspense and emotional torment is what keeps me, and probably you, glued to the screen, even when it hurts to watch.
So if, like me, you’ll inevitably fall into a state of madness and fear of the void when the end finally arrives, I’ve got a list of dramas which embody this same haunting spirit. They’re the kind which infiltrate your skin, the kind which involve the villains not being nameless strangers but the mothers, the fathers, the lovers, and the boundaries between love and devastation paper-thin.
K-dramas like Queen Mantis
Flower of Evil
Lee Joon-gi and Moon Chae-won play the leads in this thriller, Flower of Evil, which centres around Baek Hee-sung, the model husband with a dark past: He hails from a family of serial killers. His detective wife starts digging up the truth, which could bring her family crashing down.
Much like Su-yeol’s struggle with his mother Yi-shin’s monstrous shadow, Hee-sung is a man chained to his father’s violent legacy. The fear of inherited darkness is central to both stories. Su-yeol wonders if his blood ties condemn him to repeat Yi-shin’s crimes, just as Hee-sung fights to prove he is not the monster his lineage suggests. What makes both arcs so powerful is the emotional duality: love is still present, but it is poisoned by mistrust and horror. Watching Ji-won doubt her husband mirrors Su-yeol doubting himself, and both dramas force us to question whether blood really dictates destiny.
Mouse
In this drama, Lee Seung-gi stars as a rookie cop who learns that psychopathy can be identified before birth. The discovery leads to chilling revelations about his own past and forces him to confront the monster within.
What makes Mouse eerily close to Su-yeol’s plight is the question of blood inheritance. Su-yeol cannot shake Yi-shin’s taunts that he is her son and, therefore, bound to her darkness. Similarly, Ba-reum’s entire life is defined by the terror that his genes may dictate his actions. Yi-shin’s psychological control comes from weaponising Su-yeol’s fear of himself, and Mouse mirrors that perfectly, showing how a character can become their own worst enemy when family history dictates their identity. Both stories force us to wonder whether evil is truly born or made.
Kill It
Kill It brings us into contact with Soo-hyun, Jang Ki-yong’s character, a vet by day and hired assassin by night. His life is one of endless secrecy, his current one of coldness and his future bathed in abandonment and pain. Opposite him is Nana playing Do Hyun-jin, a detective chasing realities which form a straight line between her and his secret world. The drama proceeds as tragedy and action with a storyline of people defined by lostness and driven into lives they did not first aspire to.
Soo-hyun, as with Su-yeol, is a character built from the wounds of his childhood. As Su-yeol bears the ghost of Yi-shin’s violence, Soo-hyun bears the stain of his upbringing and the choices he had little discretion but to make. The two men wrestle with bloodstains on their own hands and cannot determine whether they killed by chance or choice. As Yi-shin cements her authority over Su-yeol by reminding him of the blood between them, Soo-hyun tortures himself by the family and the history which made him what he became. The echoes confirm how a wounded past creates a violent present.
The Devil
A classic of early psychological thrillers, The Devil, aka The Lucifer, features Joo Ji-hoon as Oh Seung-ha, a vengeful lawyer, and Uhm Tae-woong as Kang Oh-soo, a troubled detective locked into a horrific past. As murders happen one by one, a psychic female (Shin Min-ah) holds the key to solving the mystery. The narrative is entangled with elements of payback, guilt, and destiny, creating a convoluted tale of revenge and justice.
The parallel between the abusive control of Yi-shin over Su-yeol comes through the ways the wounds of the past dictate violence for the present. Seung-ha’s actions cannot be random but are founded upon ancient wounds which festered and did not close, as violence by Yi-shin is grotesquely supported by her skewed concept of the universe. For the character of Su-yeol, all movement into the future is dictated by the weight of his mom’s sin, corresponding to the ways Seung-ha schemes his revenge from the shadows of his trauma. The two dramas also trace the ways family and the past become prisons from which one cannot escape.
Watcher
Watcher is a slow-burning, tensely thrilling movie by Ahn Gil-ho and starring Han Suk-kyu, Seo Kang-joon, and Kim Hyun-joo as part of an anti-corruption unit assembled by a murder case, which eventually connects up with their own troubled histories. Most mystery-solving thrillers resist wallowing over the inner lives of the characters, but this one lingers over the ways the characters’ trauma structures their decisions and eats away at their sense of right and wrong. Its closed-in, tensely thrilling mood makes you suspect everyone’s motives.
The similarities with Su-yeol are compelling: as Yi-shin’s shadow controls her son’s every move, the Watcher characters exist beneath the crushing power of what occurred when they were children. Trauma as destiny, the past as a place from which one cannot escape. Yi-shin’s control over Su-yeol isn’t merely her violence, but the mental strangulation of memory, the fact that her crimes sculpted him into the man he is. Watcher bears this same emotional load, revealing us individuals who cannot escape the violence which raised them.
