Meme movies: when internet culture becomes cinema

What do we mean by internet culture? In the simplest way, anything that we share across the internet, like ideas, practices, behaviours, and so on. That includes:

Memes and viral trends are usually based on our shared experiences; it’s why they go viral in the first place, it just connects. When a filmmaker takes that and references it in their work, they tap into something we’ve already got a connection to.

If you think about how fragmented and fast-paced (not to mention short-lived) stuff can be on the internet, it’s meant a new type of filmmaking with different narrative techniques being used.

Back to the fanbase thing again, lots of internet phenomena has a dedicated group of fans champing at the bit for more of the same kind of content. This can be a double-edged sword if those fans don’t like what’s made!

Let’s start our meme movies in 2010 with The Social Network. The exponential growth of Facebook led to this David Fincher directed film about Mark Zuckerberg and the lawsuits he faced from former colleagues. With hindsight, Facebook was really the dawn of proper social media and how quickly everyone adopted it in the 00s changed the way we interacted online, which had a knock-on from everything from personal relationships to global politics.

Creepypasta started on 4chan as a variation of the portmanteau of copy and paste – copypasta. Creepypasta became a word to mean any kind of content online that had a spooky edge that was intended to frighten people or creep them out. Slenderman was one such creepypasta movie, featuring a faceless tall figure in a suit who inspired a lot of stories and other content. The horror film Slender Man (2018) was the culmination of this, a genuine meme movie, telling the story of a group of teens who summon him – though fans weren’t all that impressed with the results.

This was a Twitter (now X) thread of 148 posts that went viral in 2015. Aziah King was the poster (better known as Zola) and claimed the tale of a road trip chock full of sex and crime, was true. And by all accounts, it is! Quite a few news outlets investigated and were able to verify major parts of the story. A film followed in 2021 after it caught the eye of A24.

Another Creepypasta movie, but The Backrooms deserves its own spot on the list because it became huge. The premise is hard to explain if you’re not Extremely Online, but it’s a take on a liminal space like the kind in a game you can only access by passing through things that you couldn’t normally, like walls. People took this and ran with it, creating their own “levels” with different features that include creepy monsters/creatures.

In 2022 a short film debuted based on the legend, created by YouTubers with the view of producing a feature length film in the future, with A24… of course.

It’s no surprise that, as a big player in internet culture, YouTube is reshaping cinema.

Online dating deceptions have become a huge thing, not just within the sites they happen but as entertaining stories or even warnings across different platforms. Catfish, a 2010 documentary meme movie explored one particular kind, now (because of the film) coined catfishing, where someone creates an entirely fake persona including making a presence across social media channels, with the purpose of leading someone on, either for fun, or for more sinister purposes like to extort money out of them.

There are lots of critiques about how we interact with technology and with each other in the internet age, and no series has done this better than Black Mirror (2011-present). Episodes like Nosedive and Hated in the Nation both deal with our behaviour in terms of cyberbullying, mob mentality, and the idea of needing to feel validated over every interaction.

With huge potential audience on the net, everyone who watches a true crime documentary seems to become an armchair investigator. Mockumentary show American Vandal (2017-2018) parodies this by investigating pranks in a way that mimics the true crime format. It’s quite meta, and falls a little flat at times, but it’s a good commentary on how quickly real lives can become the obsession of a mob of people online.

These silly little icons have become a universal form of online communication and many of us use them without thinking, on a daily basis. This was translated into film The Emoji Movie (2017), set in a place called Textopolis, which is, of course, inside a smartphone.

The story follows Gene, an emoji who is capable of many expressions but wants to be more like single-purpose emojis. The film gets even deeper into the internet rabbit hole with nods to popular apps like Candy Crush. Although it’s for kids, there’s a definite (if subtle) tackling of our increasing reliance on technology.

There are more tools available than ever to make films by creators of all skills and experience, and more than enough material to inspire film and TV production for decades to come. With the introduction of AI tools into the mix though, we’ll very likely start to see lots of AI produced content that will no doubt – because it’s being trained almost entirely on information from online – be a reflection of internet culture, in one way or another. This becoming even more meta is a strong possibility too, as we’ll likely be asked to directly influence the course of a story in real time – something shows like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018) already set the groundwork for.

This has already been done with films like Life in a Day (2011) which has a series of clips put together to show things that are happening in the world across one day. There’s the potential for something even bigger to be created in a similar way, particularly with people having faster internet speeds and better access to good quality technology than they did in 2011.

We’ve seen already that fans kicking off about cancellations online can be used to great effect and have a lot of influence in Hollywood decision making. In 2017, following the release of Justice League, fans were not happy and started to demand (under the hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut) that director Zack Snyder (who had to step away from the production for personal reasons) release his own cut of the film. This maintained a fairly impressive momentum for years, and in 2020 Warner Brothers relented, saying Snyder would have the budget to finish his version. In 2021 Zack Snyder’s Justice League was released… and the fans weren’t particularly happy with that either.

Be careful what you wish for, we suppose.

Anyway, we can expect a lot more of this kind of thing going forwards, but whether it will have any real-world effect is anyone’s guess.

Interested in more cinematic deep-dives? Check out our take on cyborgs and cinema, body horror in film, and comic-book film adaptations.