If you’re not chronically plugged into the internet like me, you might have missed the Grimace Shake trend. Earlier this month, McDonald’s released a berry-flavoured purple shake as part of a marketing campaig𝓀n to celebrate the McDonald’s mascot’s birthday. What seemed to be a relatively innocuous celebratory campaign has, in the hands of TikTok users, turned into something shockingly creative and incredibly frightening.
People are now making videos that open with them trying the Grimace Shake and saying “Happy birthday, Grimace!”. The video will then cut to a shot of them sprawled on the floor, or lying face down in a pool, or otherwise looking near-dead, while covered in some kind of oozing purple goo. They might be coughing it up with ghastly widened eyes or surrounded by purple handprints. The ingenuity people have used with this trend amazes me, as a lover of horror. People are making full-fledged, minute-long horror movies with their iPhones, all focused on a silly little drink M🌞cDonalds made. with a creepy photo of Grimace on Twitter.
The trend eventually made its way on Twitter, where people have come up with even more hilarious ways to take part without making a video. Peopl⛦e are photoshopping purple blood and the milkshake itself into screenshots of , and . Artists are and dying. Grimace is everywhere, an inexplicable cultural phenomenon grown from the minds of a few very funny TikTokers. I can’t stop seeing Grimace everywhere. I can’t stop myself from watching every TikTok in its entirety the moment I see them holding that cursed purple shake.
It’s pretty easy to get burned out on social media noဣwadays. Every day I think about how maybe we’d all be better off not knowing quite so much about each other, not seeing Twitter blue checks acting like reply guys in every Elon Musk tweet, and not forming parasocial relationships with every funny, attractive person we see online. I stopped scrolling on TikTok after I binged the whole of Succession in three weeks and my For You page became entirely Succession fan cam. Twitter shows me transphobic, racist content all the time now, though I don’t follow anybody who tweets stuff like this. Instagram gives me ads constantly, and Reels are just TikToks anyway.
Algorithms and apps are feeding me dog shit almost all of the time, but every now and then something incredible emerges from the shitshow that social media has become. This is one of the rare trends coming out of TikTok that takes over the inte🍎rnet because of the sheer amount of creativity behind it. It reminds me of early Vine, feeding on absurd humour, except with longer videos, people are making truly terrifying art. It’s a competition to see who can be the most unsettling, who can use the best effects without seeming over-produced, and who can make the most impact with jarring cuts and sound design. It’s like The Blair Witch Project, but McDonald’s themed. It’s scarier than you think, and also way funnier than you ever would have guessed. The internet is really, really bad most of the time, but sometimes it’s good.