Children’s Culture Guide for Adults: Why Black Phone Is so Popular?
This week, kids and teens watch the trailer for the upcoming horror movie Black Phone , comment on Willy Wonka’s outfit, and signal a red flag. What does all this mean? You decide.
Viral Video of the Week: Black Phone Trailer
Sometimes the trailer for a movie looks different, like thetrailer for the upcoming horror movie Black Phone . Nearly two million people watched the trailer on its first day on YouTube, although it’s not the last entry in the popular franchise (like theScream trailer , also released this week), and Ethan Hawke is the main star.
So how exactly did this trailer break through the clutter and go viral? (Sure, it looks creepy, but other horror trailers too.) This one echoes the childhood fear we hammer into children’s skulls: if you’re not careful, the person in the van will pick you up. It works great with its barely pubescent stars, young enough to be helpless. Plus, Ethan Hawke’s villain, Invader, looks downright sinister, like the convoluted mix of Lon Cheney in London After Midnight and real-life serial killer Richard Ramirez.
Woman discovers another body buried in her sister’s grave
Speaking of scary things, TikToker Jessica Tawil ( @jesstawil ) made a terrible discovery this Halloween season. In the video, she says she was at her sister’s grave and found another body on it.
In a subsequent video, the alleged cemetery representative did not explain that “all graves are different,” but was reportedly unable to tell the family who was buried on top of their loved one and why. In the last video, the cemetery has leveled the grave and (possibly) removed the lost tenant’s corpse. Predictably, Tawil said her family hired a lawyer. If you’ve seen a poltergeist , you know how it ends.
All videos you don’t see on TikTok
If you’re worried about what TikTok is doing to make the service safer for kids, TikTok released a report this week detailing the content they removed between April 1 and June 30, 2021. According to the report, a total of 81,518,334 videos were pulled by their automatic content moderation system – about one percent of the total videos posted during that period. The content moderation system is designed to remove videos that violate TikTok’s policies regarding “negligible safety, adult nudity and sexual activity, violent and graphic content, and illegal activities.” Read the entire report here .
Fan reactions to Wonka’s first photo are mixed
This week, the internet first saw actor Timothy Chalamet as Willie Wonka for the upcoming Wonka prequel … and they have their own opinion .
The verdict is ambiguous. A large contingent of online fans think the new Wonka is “sexy” while others think he looks like a doll. The idea for the costume seemed to be to combine parts of Willy Wonka’s Gene Wilder with parts of the Johnny Depp version of the character, but the result was a strangely similar Gonzo from a Muppet Christmas Carol .
TikTok Fake Nut Test
Our car-obsessed partner site Jalopnik is reporting a dangerous new TikTok challenge: The Lug Nut Challenge . To participate, people are encouraged to loosen the nuts on someone’s car and see what happens. (Spoiler alert: It makes a lot of noise and eventually the wheel falls off.) But like the Slap the Teacher I mentioned earlier, the Lug Nut Challenge doesn’t really seem to exist.
Despite reports from news sources about loosening the nuts, Jalopnik went deep in thought, YouTube and TikTok found bugs – not videos of pranksters loosening the nuts, not even videos encouraging other people to do it.
This trend has the potential to be widespread. The more people become aware of this, the more people will check their tires, find loose nuts and spread the word that they are victims of this trend, even if the nuts can be loosened on their own.
What’s going on with the red flag meme?
If you’ve seen a lot of red flags in Twitter, TikTok, and Friendster’s comment sections, here’s what’s going on: For kids, emojis with a red flag mean the utterance indicates that the speaker is a bunch of rubbish. … This usually happens in terms of dating, for example, “If it says so on a date, it’s a red flag.”
It all started relatively seriously with examples of red flags such as holes in the wall. But it quickly turned into a joke where a person could post something like “I hate Radiohead” followed by a few red flags.