I have a confession to make: I still haven’t watched Skibidi Toilet. I say this despite knowing the deep shame it brings to me and my family here at Passionfruit, as it’s more likely than not that whatever it is that man’s head is doing in the toilet, you found out about it from us.
My elderly millennial brain has stopped me from impulse-clicking on that thumbnail out of self-preservation. See, I was 18 when “The Ring” came out, and I was first in line with my horror-loving dad to see Gore Vidal’s adaptation of “Ringu” on my first break home from Oberlin College. It’s an experience I’ll never forget for several reasons, like a terrifyingly effective and formative use of an early jump scare. The other being that it was the first time I had ever heard my father shriek.
As we walked out of the movie in spooky silence, I had my first glimpse of mortality. Seeing my dad so pale and shaken, it struck me: one day, I would meet my end via a piece of cursed media, something so jarring and otherworldly that merely reading about it would cause me to have an immediate heart attack and keel over.
I am not joking, this is a very real fear I have and why I refuse to see “Twisters” in 4D.
But one woman’s jump scare is another person’s decapitated toilet head eating it up no crumbs left, and Hollywood’s finally taken the note. Skibidi toilet, as Lon Harris writes in this week’s column, is the latest meme IP to be adapted into a feature film, a practice dating back almost twenty years to “Snakes on a Plane.” (Which like, kill me. I was already working a job for Barry Diller when that film came out.)
THE COMMENTS SECTION
“Will I understand Longlegs if I haven’t seen Longleg yet?”
I agree with Lon that feature films have been hit-or- “Hello fellow kids.” You’ve got to balance the triumph of seeing Twitch streamers cameo in “Fall Guy” with the fact that someone at Sony greenlit a “Slender Man” movie in 2018. In retrospect, it’s hard to tell what part was the biggest bummer: neck and neck three-way tie between a major studio thinking it could bank on IRL violence as a viral marketing ploy, then four years sitting on it, and somehow not being wrong.
Despite this, my takeaway from the news about YouTube’s favorite toilet ghoul going Hollywood is one of heartfelt, resounding joy. I refuse to believe children are allowed to watch something that’s clearly meant to be a midnight movie that David Lynch screens exclusively to interns while making quinoa, and in that case, the odds are looking good for a hit. The content-to-horror genre is (no pun intended) killing it. Studios like A24, Shudder, and Neon (who will be producing YouTuber Chris Stuckmann’s debut feature film) have all made their names by finding online auteurs with bold, unconventional visions and giving them a distribution deal to peddle their nightmares to the masses. It was only a matter of time before Michael Bay and his team got into the action with Skibidi.
This lighting-in-a-bottle is reminiscent of 2014 Adult Swim’s late-night block, when you could tune in at 4 am and find yourself transported to a bizarro world where chaos reigned. That was when we got the sitcom-premise-turned-meta-nightmare, “Too Many Cooks,” or when you would find yourself in Reddit as the dawn broke, searching a subgroup about Wham City Comedy’s “This House has People In It” for clues. It’s a win-win-win: for the studios to see healthy returns on micro-budget investments in a year during which blockbusters are bombing at the box office. For the creators themselves, who retain an almost unheard-of level of creative control for first-time writers/directors in the industry. And perhaps most importantly, for us, the Watchers (™).
Kyle Edward Ball released “Heck” as a short proof-of-concept for his YouTube surrealist horror channel Bitesized Nightmares in 2020 and spent $15k and two years of his life turning it into a feature film in under two years. IFC and Shudder bought the distribution rights for “Skinamarink” after seeing it at a festival and gave it a limited theatrical release, where it earned a healthy $2.1 million.
No, it’s not “Paranormal Activity” money, but then again that was the most profitable film ever made. Which itself was born out of Jason Blum’s FOMO from having turned down 1999’s “Blair Witch Project,” the OG GOAT of leveraging audiences’ expectations against their understanding of a then still-nascent Internet immersive unfiction. That campaign was so successful, it became synonymous not only with the concept of guerilla marketing – “Cloverfield,” “Lost” and “The Dark Knight” being three notable examples that followed suit – but for an entire generation of horror shorthand. The shaky-cam, lo-fi aesthetic of “found footage” horror films then led to the rise of online alternate reality games (ARGs) on YouTube, like “Marble Hornets.”
A week after “Skinamarink” hit theaters, A24 announced it was developing a “Backrooms” feature with YouTuber Kane Pixels, aka Kane Parsons. The Backrooms began as creepypasta on 4chan as a scary story about liminal spaces. In 2022, Parsons had created what would become the definitive Backrooms aesthetic, melding his impressive Blender CGI and storytelling abilities into a riveting and unsettling sci-fi horror portraying an infinitely looping hell as banal office spaces in an alternate dimension, where monsters stalked, scientists time-traveled and no-clippers disappeared forever.
Kane was 15 when he made his first Backrooms video, appropriately titled “Backrooms (Found Footage).” It currently has 60.5 million views. A24 didn’t need to do much more than napkin math to see the potential money in producing Parson’s vision, though they did pair with a director who is above the legal drinking age.
In this light, Bay’s purchase of Skibidi makes perfect sense. As does Neon’s pick-up of Stuckmann’s “Shelby Oaks” coming right on the heels of their massive success with the Oz Perkins sleeper hit “Longlegs,” which in its second week has already raked in $54 million at the global box office, purely on the strength of a single-digit P&E spend.
While Perkins himself isn’t an online creator, he and Neon’s marketing team clearly understood the assignment with their seemingly bizarre decision to completely hide the film’s biggest star and its titular antagonist (spoilers!), executive producer Nic Cage. It is the most unhinged performance in a career long-defined by unhinged performances. Yet for people who’d been following “Longlegs” religiously since Neon dropped its first cryptic, cipher-filled teaser on X in January and dutifully followed the trailheads and breadcrumbs —a Geocities-inspired website, a Zodiac-y cipher placed in the Seattle Times, and a giant billboard in Los Angeles featuring a phone number that connects you to daddy Longlegs himself — the actor’s performance was an afterthought. The expectations for those fans were raised too high, because the campaign had been too good at the internet.
If anything, the one drawback of having content creators go pro is exactly this type of Catch-22: the likelihood that their background in interactive world-building mythology via gameplay will not be something their actual movie or show as a product can ever make good on, by nature of it being an entirely different medium with different constraints. That’s the REAL Cloverfield Paradox. We had it in our hearts all along.
I finally convinced my dad to watch “Longlegs” yesterday. His response: “It’s not as scary as ‘The Ring.’”
– Drew Grant, Editorial Director
CULTURE
Can Hollywood Turn Internet Weirdness into a Franchise?
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LABOR
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