Last Updated on January 29, 2025 by Angel Melanson
Viral moments happen for plenty of reasons. Sometimes, as in the heyday of YouTube, it’s because something inane is framed in a way that becomes incredibly funny upon repetition. (See: the classic Charlie bit my finger, or any amount of quotes from the long-deceased Vine.) Other times, a moment baffles Internet audiences so badly that they can’t help but repeat it over and over again, as is the case for anyone who adopted the phrase “holding space” into their vocabulary recently.
So why, of all the things that could’ve come out of Robert Eggers’ remake of Nosferatu, is the Internet’s biggest takeaway an impression of Bill Skarsgård’s Count Orlok saying “you must bounce on it crazy style”?
For me, it’s not entirely a surprise; I’m of the generation that grew up on the Internet, and the sheer volume of people describing Nosferatu as the horniest film they’ve ever seen makes it seem inevitable that any memes to come out of the film would be at least mildly sexual in nature. Any chance to make it weird, and people on the Internet will take it, for better or for worse.
But where did it come from? Why, when Orlok speaks only in riddles and a smoker’s lung accent that Skarsgård worked hard to achieve, did modern vernacular make its way into Eggers’ story of desire and deviancy?
With some gentle encouragement from the other folks here at FANGORIA, I decided to investigate. Y’know, for science.
As it turns out, the trend has nothing to do with the actual plot of the film, also starring Nicholas Hoult and Lily-Rose Depp. Surprising, given the whole “vampire as sexual deviant” thing Eggers was going for, but if there’s one thing that’s always true, it’s that no matter how weird a filmmaker decides to go with their art, fans will always make it weirder.
As most viral moments usually do these days, it all started with a TikTok.
User @teethmouthy, who from here on I’ll be referring to as Teeth, posted a video on December 31 imitating Skarsgård’s Orlok voice, in which they quoted lyrics from A$AP Ferg’s song “Plain Jane,” which I will not repeat here for the sake of readers’ (and my own) sanity. They said later in the video that they “cannot stop talking like f**kin’ Nosferatu,” and that “it’s gonna be a problem” — little did they know what was to come.
But it wasn’t until they posted a reply video that the trend really kicked into high gear. User @mt.punchy commented, “the search being ‘nosferatu you must bounce on it' is crazy work,” referring to TikTok’s auto search function, which suggests search terms for users based on the content of the video they’re currently watching. Using the app’s video reply feature, Teeth responded with the infamous words, and thus, a meme was born.
@teethmouthy Replying to @🤷♂️ #nosferatu #countorlok ♬ original sound – Teeth Mouthy 🍉
At the moment, Teeth’s video has currently racked up 4.6 million views, with the original imitation video sitting at 1.1 million. They’ve only posted five videos since the trend went viral, including two additional videos featuring Orlok imitations, both racking up over a million views each. The “bounce on it” sound, which can be reused by other users, shockingly only has 2,021 posts added to it as of writing, despite the fact that the trend seems much more ubiquitous than that.
Many videos under the sound feature users cosplaying as Orlok — mustache and all — lip-syncing to the sound, but the trend has also featured animations and fan edits, alongside regular users using it for various reasons. Many users have posted themselves repeating it — including user @ancientliteraturedud, who did so in Old Norse — and plenty of others have tried to imitate Teeth’s success to varying degrees with their own impressions. There are certainly plenty of other edits that have gone viral to lesser degrees — including one set to Todrick Hall’s “Nails, Hair, Hips, Heels” that’s permanently burned into my brain — but nothing has captured the collective desire for a vocal stim quite the way Teeth has.
It’s a trend that’s remained primarily on TikTok, though it seems to have broken through at least partially to Instagram, where artists like @l.frostad have illustrated Orlok muttering the famous words. It has yet to make it to Know Your Meme, despite the film itself having its own dedicated page, but with TikTok no longer going away for Americans, it’s still got plenty of time to catch on, especially now that the film is available on digital.
Needless to say, my TikTok algorithm will never be the same.
Nosferatu is playing now in theaters, and is available at home on digital platforms.
