![]() ![]() You can learn a lot about Momo by tracing the ways her myth has been reformulated for the culture in which it’s spreading. Fear, Reckoning and Viralityįear of Momo has been acute for years, but now she has a name and a face. And while Momo really is coming for someone in more or less the manners described, it’s not the children. It’s also true that she is able to entrance people almost instantly by appearing, jarringly, in the middle of their media (as above, sorry), and that such appearances result in disembodied voices commanding victims up a ladder of misery. This much is true: The Momo Challenge is a moral panic spreading through new and powerful channels. This panic was followed by a round of more sober coverage characterizing Momo, and the challenge, as a “ hoax,” warning credulous adults that they were opening the door to trolls who might actually enact elements of the myth to get a rise out of people, and that they were themselves needlessly exposing children to violent concepts by engaging with the story themselves. In recent months, Momo has graced countless local news segments, received concerned national coverage as the subjects of viral “suicide games,” and even found her way into the consciousness of Kim Kardashian West, who warned followers to “ monitor what your kids are watching!” There are minor adaptations that describe Momo making first contact, or casting her first hex, through private messages in various apps or through in-game voice chat. Later versions of the story warn that she will appear in the middle of children’s videos to encourage self-harm. In one rendition of her story, she entrances children with her shocking face and then gives them increasingly morbid instructions, culminating in suicide. Like Samara, Momo is said to possess young people through screens. Starting last year, and flaring this February, Americans of “Ring”-watching age became transfixed by another string-haired demon girl menacing the youth: Momo. For now, the franchise appears to be on pause.Īt least officially. The third installment of the American series, “Rings” (2017), was a minor commercial success and a massive critical flop. ![]() ![]() “The Ring” was both horrifying and meaningfully divergent from its source material, a Japanese book and film series. The particulars of the story are less important than the version that has lodged itself in our imaginations: the tape itself, a choppy cut of generically alarming images the ringing phone, and the voice on the other end of the line whispering seven days the inhuman form crawling out of the television the waterlogged face peeking out from behind the wall of stringy black hair. In that film, Samara, a demonic orphan drowned in a well by her tormented adoptive mother, rose from the dead, via VHS tape, to terrorize the living. This is by no means a comprehensive or superlative list - think of it more as a primer to the kind of hilarious content that TikTok has to offer.Released in 2002, “ The Ring” furnished us with a fresh and memorably horrifying rendition of the folkloric vengeful ghost. If you’re not convinced, however, we’ve compiled a list of 15 TikTok videos to try and get you hooked on the app’s bonkers brand of humor. Eventually, TikTok will get a pretty good grasp on the kinds of videos that you’re all but guaranteed to like, but by that point, you’ll probably already be spending countless hours on the app. Luckily, TikTok isn’t actually all that hard to get into thanks to the power of recommendation algorithms the app’s endless For You page initially seems like an overwhelming well of content, but all you have to do is scroll and like the videos that make you laugh, smile, or feel whatever emotion you want to replicate over and over. With a somewhat insular culture that continuously recombines popular sounds and visual gags into new monstrosities, there’s a lot to keep up with just to feel like you’re truly "in" on the joke. TikTok, the short-form video app your local teens are obsessed with, can feel like an enigma to outsiders and/or people over age 24. ![]()
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