Sony's film The Interview has been pulled after hackers threatened a 9/11 style attack on any cinemas which screened the comedy.

The movie, which stars Seth Rogen and James Franco, features a fictional plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un.

A leaked scene from the film showed the leader's head engulfed in a slow-motion fireball.

Hackers, calling themselves the Guardians of Peace, warned of a "bitter fate" for viewers of the "awful" film.

There has been speculation that North Korea is behind the cyber attack which made public scripts from upcoming movies as well as stars' salaries and employees' personal emails.

Although North Korea denies involvement, it has promised "merciless" retaliation if the movie is released.

The secretive nation, which is still under communist rule, also described the hack as a "righteous deed" which may have been carried out by its "supporters and sympathisers".

Some might say North Korea has more to worry about than a film described by one critic as "muddled muck".

We've taken a look at some more immediate problems facing its citizens.

WARNING: this article contains details some may find disturbing

Hunger games

The growth rates of more than a quarter of North Korean children has been affected by malnourishment.

Two-thirds of the population, approximately 16 million people, don't know where their next meal is coming from, according to the UN.

This lack of food means that North Korean men are, on average, between 3 - 8cm (1.2 - 3.1in) shorter than men in South Korea.

Human ashes for fertiliser?

North Korea has built up its military arsenal and nuclear programme instead of helping feed its people, according to another United Nations report.

The situation has been made worse as families' movement is strictly controlled by the state, making it hard to source food.

Earlier this year, Michael Kirby, who led a UN commission of inquiry into North Korean human rights violations, claimed to the BBC World Service that some families were even forced to use the ashes of relatives as fertiliser to help grow crops.

Meanwhile large amounts of government money is understood to be spent on the "supreme leader" and "the advancement of his personality cult."

And it's reported that Kim Jong-Il, Kim Jong-un's late father, reportedly spent £700,000 a year on Hennessy cognac.

Prison camps

Conditions in North Korean gulags - work camps - are known to be extremely harsh with prisoners forced to carry out back-breaking hard labour.

Inmates are reportedly tortured if they don't obey the rules and left to die when injured.

Prisoners also face starvation. Former inmate Jeong Kwang-il, who fled North Korea in 2003, told a UN panel he dropped a third of his body weight in the three months he spent in a detention centre.

"Then they hang you so you would not be able to stand or sit," he claimed.

"If you are hung like that for three days, four days, you urinate, you defecate, you are totally dehydrated…

"[It] was so painful that I felt it was better to die."

He also described how prisoners are forced to bury the bodies of anyone who dies. This is more difficult in winter because the ground is frozen.

In such cases it's reported that bodies are stored in a warehouse. Jeong Kwang-il wrote in The Guardian: "When we got into the warehouse to remove the corpses, it was really horrible since the bodies were rotten and eaten by rats.

"We buried corpses as if they were trash. No one knows or remembers who they were."

Punished for a relatives' actions

In the past, punishments have been handed out to people for the apparent "sins" of a relative.

Shin Dong-hyuk, 30, is believed to be the first person born in a prison camp who managed to escape.

Shin believes that he and his family were imprisoned because two of his uncles defected to South Korea during the Korean War in the early 1950s.

He also says that he saw his own mother executed.

'Misunderstandings'

Despite reports condemning North Korea for human rights abuses, the country's leaders dismiss the claims as "misunderstandings".

In September North Korea published a 50,000-word report saying its citizens "enjoy genuine human rights".

On Tuesday North Korea's UN ambassador Ja Song-nam said that "the so-called 'human rights issue' in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is politically fabricated" and instead asked for the United Nations Security council to look into reports of CIA torture.

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