For this week’s newsletter, I am diving into Zepotha! Zepotha is a 1980s horror film that’s been blowing up on TikTok as users claim it’s extremely underrated because there are only limited amounts of VHS tapes of the film floating around in the world, and it isn’t available to rent or stream online anywhere. However, social media is doing what they do best and nonstop posting about the film and educating those who haven’t seen it on its plot and who the characters are. They’ve even started commenting all over each other’s TikToks telling them which character from Zepotha they look like. If you’re a TikTok user wondering which Zepotha character you are, there’s now a randomized filter that will tell you just that!
A lot of things have gone viral on TikTok, recently the act of pretending to be an AI robot and going live on the platform while viewers send you money, but Zepotha has gone viral faster than most other trends. That’s due to the fact that the film’s plot is pretty enticing, like other 80s slasher films. TikTok user @mondayhatesyout00 shared the most accurate and comprehensible explanation of the plot, which follows a group of teenagers in the town Zepotha, Illinois. She describes it as a crossover between a few other popular movies, but it’s also incredibly unique. In the same way, New York City feels like a character in the many films it acts as the backdrop for, Zepotha feels like a character in the slasher film.Â
Zepotha follows characters like Alaine, Maxine, and Danny, and as @mondayhatesyout00 explains, Alaine has been having psychic dreams since she was a child, and this becomes deadly when a vicious kidnapper she dreamed up goes on a killing spree with her mother as one of the main victims. However, other TikTok users have different perspectives on the movie’s plot and have told completely different stories, with the only similarities being the names of the main characters and the 80s horror genre.Â
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This is because Zepotha isn’t actually a real movie, and the whole trend was created to trick users into believing the movie exists, seemingly as a genius marketing strategy for a musical artist named Emily Jeffri. Emily posted a TikTok encouraging her followers to make videos talking about this 80s movie that doesn’t actually exist to prank other TikTok users, but she ended up using one of her songs in the video, and that song has now been used over 10 thousand times on the app. While it’s been funny watching everyone freak out over the fake movie, and it was a very creative way to promote a song, I can’t help but feel the trend is related to the WGA and SAG strikes.
With Hollywood on hold, no one knows when movies will begin production again, and while there are still films and tv shows premiering, the stars of the work aren’t allowed to promote them. There have been no red-carpet premieres, and any movies that were in production came to a halt. In situations when it feels like the world has been put on pause, social media users get creative. SAG has encouraged influencers and social media users not to promote struck work online, and Zepotha feels like a way for film buffs to continue doing what they love to do, talking about and analyzing films without crossing the picket line.Â
I even watched a YouTube video by TheRandomShow where the creator showed a screenplay they’d been working on for the movie that doesn’t actually exist. The trend feels very reminiscent of a similar project TikTok users created a few years ago. At the height of the pandemic, when we were all locked in our homes, TikTok was flooded with videos and pitches for Ratatouille The Musical, a Broadway show based on the movie of the same name. Since Hollywood couldn’t produce anything new at the moment and all of Broadway had shut down, fans had to come up with their own content. The fictional Broadway show gained so much traction that Seaview Productions presented a filmed concert rendition of the TikTok musical in January 2021 to benefit the Actor’s Fund.
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The Zepotha lore feels almost identical, though the film is in a very different genre than the TikTok musical. While it may seem like a silly trend that will eventually blow over, it’s actually a sign of the times and encapsulates just how talented and creative the younger generation is. When the strikes do conclude, studios have a whole new generation of creatives to look out for, to hire, and to fairly compensate. The trend is further proof that people are drawn to things created by other people, not by AI. Zepotha may not be real, at least for now, but the reaction to the film is very real and may just be the greatest thing to come out of the WGA and SAG strikes so far.