halloween is still Pretty consistent over the decades. Chocolate, cobwebs, carvings, and a heated debate about the relative delicacy of candy corn become the rituals of October. But there are also memes that ebb and flow like sheets with outstretched arms like ghosts. Memes come and go.
It started with people laughing at tombstones. In 1998, a Colorado resident named June Shaputis put together a humorous epitaph on her personal website. Over the next few years, people shared their examples on forums and even made jokes on sites like Tombstonebuilder.com. Today’s All Hallows Meme celebrants wear pumpkins on their heads and take beautiful photos for TikTok. The creepy online trends are different each fall, but they all tell the truth about the truly scary things in the world.
“Generally, the holidays tend to have memes, but there’s something unique about Halloween,” said Don Caldwell, general manager of the meme encyclopedia Know Your Meme, where he has worked for nearly 13 (ooOoOo! ) year. Caldwell said that Spooktober has always been a “remembered” holiday, with Halloween images often outnumbering Christmas and Thanksgiving.
Caldwell believes this is because key elements of Halloween “adapted to internet culture.” For finally online, the carved pumpkins and ceremonial costumes make up the kind of easily shareable visuals the internet offers.In the early 2010s, a “pretty scary” pumpkin was low battery symbol The term “student loans” often goes viral online.At the same time, emoticons and clothing have long had a symbiotic relationship, emoticons can become clothing, and clothing can also be become memes.
While Halloween memes vary from year to year, Caldwell said there is a consistent theme. “It’s rarely really scary or scary,” he said, “it’s usually kind of cute. I think that juxtaposition is appealing to people.”
Enter the Pumpkin Dance. Two nights before Halloween in 2006, Nebraska news anchor Matt Geiler decided to dance to fill a gap in his broadcast schedule. ghostbusters The theme song for a black bodysuit with a pumpkin on its face. Although it was uploaded to YouTube shortly after, Geiler’s dance didn’t catch on until 2009, and dozens of people have since remixed and parodied the video, which now has more than 10 million views.
Then there’s the “ghost”. In 2009, Mike Woolridge took a photo of the flawed logo while browsing Ross Dress for Less. After somewhere seemingly forgetting how to write the letter K, plastic banners read “spoopy” on cleverly arranged bones. Searches for the image “spoopy” on Tumblr and Google spiked between 2015 and 2018.By 2017, many Popular posts Disappointed at the exaggeration.
Did this kill spoopy? No, because spoopy is undead – doomed to linger on earth for decades, unable to be destroyed by stakes, silver bullets, or tweets about how annoying you find it. But as content creator Eddy Burback Observed October 2020: “Yes, there’s definitely a pandemic, but at least nobody’s talking about ‘soopy’ anymore.” Instead, they erected 12-foot skeletons from Home Depot.
