Since everyone is locked up in their homes during the COVID-19 pandemic, people have been finding ways to entertain themselves, and the solution was simple: TikTok. It's where most trends have come from today, including viral dance challenges.
Nevertheless, there's a growing trend on the platform, and it's not for the faint of heart.
What is Haunted TikTok?
Known as Haunted TikTok, these videos range from the outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic and the empty streets to creepypastas, tours of haunted places, stories of alleged real-life haunts, and even performance artists, who create these videos with the intent of creating something haunting and spooky.
For those who are not familiar, creepypastas are short horror stories created by amateur writers, often found on Reddit.
In a report by Mashable, Haunted TikTok has tons of haunting and creepy videos and just a DISCLAIMER, if you want to check these videos out, you should brace yourself for tons of creepy and disturbing content--and as we said earlier, it's not for the faint of heart.
Although if you want to check out some of these contents, you can search the following hashtags: #HorrorTikTok, #GhostTikTok, #CursedTikTok, #ScaryTikTok, and #CreepyTikTok.
As it turns out, these videos have become incredibly popular, gaining from one to 11 billion views.
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Creating a Web Horror Series
Among the perhaps tamer videos are the ones from @where_is_everybody, which, according to the news outlet, follows a man known Alexander Nielsen, who has been showing empty streets, replaced by shadowy ghost figures.
He's apparently been doing it since October 2019, a few months before the coronavirus pandemic.
@where_is_everybody Hey kinda serious here like my entire town is missing I’m not really sure what to do is this happening elsewhere?##backtohoops ##teamvampire ##inverted ♬ original sound - where_is_everybody
But as the situation grew dire, so did his videos, showing deserted highways and captions suggesting that food has become more scarce.
Of course, the videos were created by a performance artist named John Galascio, who said another web horror series from Twitter inspire the series of videos he created for @where_is_everybody.
He also believes that the platform's short-form video format is the best way to tell scary stories like his as 15 seconds is "the perfect amount of time to show an event and keep the viewers intrigued, while also creating a cliffhanger."
Although not as shocking as the other haunted videos, these ones are definitely scarier, seeing as it's really happening in real-life, with tons of people staying indoors and the roads outside deserted.
Why Creators are Choosing the Platform
"The pandemic is already like the ghost that's haunting us," said assistant professor Jessica Maddox from Alabama University, who studies creative media and digital media. "Like all good horror, the Haunted TikTok trend provides us with a sense of control over something scary that we don't have control over in our real lives."
Maddox said that the content on the platform's scary side came from web horror, which uses social media platforms to create retellings of old urban legends into the modern age.
It's no wonder that creative people are using TikTok, even to share horror stories.
Despite the controversy surrounding it now, it's a great app to film, edit, and put together a story that people could easily follow.
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