5 Movies Based On Memes That Are Actually Worth Watching
When it comes to memes, it’s more than just a humorous image that goes viral on social media. It’s also ideas or posts that spread on the internet, are relatable, and are remixed or adapted over and over by different users based on their own experiences of interpretation of the material. And as we’ve seen in the past couple of years, a lot of those memes end up becoming movies that are actually worth watching.
The movies on this list started as memes. They spent years circulating the internet, their lore becoming layered and many of them being transformed into games, short films, and even ending up being memed into well established shows. So if you’re looking for your next meme-inspired movie, head over to Prime Video, Netflix, and more; and you’re open to learning some surprising internet lore, this is the list for you!
Before Kane Parsons’ Backrooms became a theatrical release darling, Backrooms itself started as a meme on 4chan.
The meme this movie is based on started back in 2019 with an anonymous post where a user posted a photograph of an empty yellow room. And they were looking for other images that just feel a little off. Someone responded to that request with a short story where if you “noclip out of reality” you end up in an endless maze known as the Backrooms. From there, users introduced a concept of different levels of the Backrooms, the lore expanding into games and up to a thousand levels.
Parsons joined in on the discourse and made his own short film series before creating a feature film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve. In this iteration you saw a depressed furniture store owner, who used to be an architect, become obsessed with the Backrooms after he discovers them. And what we’re left with is an unnerving movie that preys on your fears of the unknown while also having the coolest set design we’ve seen in years. I would truly watch a whole movie just about how they designed the never ending rooms.
When it comes to movies that are actually memes, Safety Not Guaranteed is a little harder to spot if you’re not chronically online.
The meme this movie is based on started on YTMND (You’re the man now, dog!), an online community and memetic hub site. It’s based on a 1997 newspaper ad featuring a picture of a man sporting a mullet next to a classifieds ad looking for a time-travel companion. And it actually was an original newspaper advertisement by John Silverira when his publisher needed help filling the classifieds for Backwoods Home Magazine. He wrote up that ad, which has now spiraled into over 800 different versions of the meme.
In 2012, the meme was transformed into an original movie of the same name starring Aubrey Plaza and Mark Duplass. It told the story of magazine employees who head out on an assignment to interview a guy who placed a classified ad looking for a time travel companion. The movie ended up being an indie gem that was feel-good, funny, sincere, and beloved by those who knew about the meme and those who have never encountered it before watching.
Out of all the movies on this list, the meme that Slender Man is based on has multiple films. But we’re just going to focus on the 2018 version.
The meme this movie is based on is a creepypasta by user Eric Knudsen on the Something Awful forum in 2009. They were doing a Photoshop contest to create original paranormal images and Knudsen depicted Slender Man as a thin humanoid figure with pale skin and no features, wearing a black suit, and having tendrils. And he was usually featured as stalking, abducting, or kidnapping children. This meme led to actual moral panic over kids being obsessed with Slender Man, multiple movies, and it even being memed into Gravity Falls (2012) to the point people thought it was an actual episode.
For the 2018 movie, things got pretty meta. Because within the movie itself there was a group of friends who became fascinated with internet lore of the Slender Man and tried to prove his existence to disastrous consequences. And while some people argued that this movie was derivative and predictable, it’s a worthwhile watch just to see how the understanding of horror memes has evolved from 2018 to what we have now with Backrooms.
Tusk is the most surprising movie based on a meme because even this writer didn’t know this weird, yet beloved indie movie was based on a meme.
The meme this movie is based on is a viral 2013 ad posted on England’s free classified site called Gumtree. In the ad, a retired man was offering free rent to a person willing to dress up in a walrus costume for 2 hours a day. Director Kevin Smith became fascinated with the ad and asked people listening to his podcast if they’d be interested in a movie based on it. They were. Then it was discovered that it wasn’t a real ad but a hoax by a writer who often did similar things, but never got a response like this one.
For the 2014 movie, Tusk saw Justin Long play an arrogant podcaster who gets more than he bargained for when he travels to Canada to interview a mysterious recluse with a fondness for walruses. And when it comes to body horror, you’ve never seen anything like what they do in this movie. Truly go into it without any spoilers because it’s that intense and we’d argue it’s Long’s second best movie after Jeepers Creepers (2001), of course.
Like Tusk, this writer didn’t initially know that Dream Scenario was based on a meme before watching it. And it’s a bit meta like Slender Man.
The meme this movie is based on was created by an Italian sociologist known as Andrea Natella in 2008. She created a website called “Ever Dream This Man?” And on the site she provided a drawing of a mysterious man who had been supposedly appearing in the dreams of people all over the world. It gained world wide attention with thousands of people claiming to know the man and have stories of their own about him. It wasn’t until 2010 that Natella revealed it was a hoax.
For the 2023 movie, the iconic Nicolas Cage starred as an ordinary family man who finds his life turned upside down when strangers suddenly start seeing him in their dreams. It’s like a meme happening in real time. People loved it, including me, because it showed Cage’s range in the same way that Pig (2021) did at the time. Cage has followed it up with other notable movies like Longlegs (2024), but it’s this film that really shows that he’s more than a high-octane weird actor. He has great comedic timing and knows how to bring complex characters to life.
