Charlie Charlie Challenge — the demon-summoning game that has taken over the web in the last couple of weeks — is probably just a weird teen meme, not a viral marketing campaign. But everyone on the internet is claiming otherwise.
The game, which claims to see people summon a demon using just pencils and paper, seemed to have come out of nowhere. But some are beginning to claim that it was actually a viral marketing campaign for the soon to be released film, The Gallows.
The two don't seem to have anything to do with one another. In the middle of the Charlie craze, The Gallows' marketing team posted a video with a character from the film taking part in the meme — and that's about where the similarities end.
Wikipedia now claims, without citation, that "It was later revealed that the Charlie Charlie challenge is in fact a promotion of the upcoming film The Gallows". The explanation then found its way onto various blogs — being written up at Daily Dot, Uproxx, Complex, ONTD and others.
The supposed explanation — that rather than coming about organically the meme was created by clever marketers — seems to have originated with a video posted to social media by the team behind the Gallows film.
That video shows a version of the Charlie Charlie Challenge being played, before a loud bang is heard and a woman is dragged down some stairs. It's not clear that the first and second bit were actually made together, since the lighting and sound are different.
(Uproxx claimed in its explanation that the film was "obviously behind the social media trend", since it had been made before the Charlie Charlie Challenge took off. But looking at the video shows that the part with the pencils was probably put together after, and spliced in with footage from the real film.)
As well as the Twitter video, the more commonly shared one is from the YouTube account for the Latin American division of Warner Brothers, which calls the film La Horca, or The Gallows in Spanish. While that might make the explanation more compelling, and suits the false Mexican origin story of the Charlie Charlie Challenge, The Gallows is actually in English and features American actors.
And the films were posted to both YouTube and Twitter on May 27. The Charlie Charlie Challenge was already fairly big by then — it really took off just a few days before, but had been passed around Spanish-language Twitter and Vine for as long as a month before.
The demon in the The Gallows does seem to be called Charlie. But in the trailer he’s not summoned by any game involving pencils or paper — what seems to upset him is that the students smash up the school theatre.
In fact, despite the similarities in their names, a central point of the film seems to be that people are told not to say the name. In the Charlie Charlie Challenge, saying the name keeps the demon happy — it has to be said to make him go away — not to enrage him.
There is no mention of the Charlie Charlie Challenge in any available marketing materials before the meme became popular, on May 24. And it seems to have originated in the Dominican Republic in late April — which would be a strange place for anyone to secretly begin a viral marketing campaign.
Many recent trends that start off among teens on Twitter have been quickly decried as marketing stunts — like Alex from Target, the teenager who was working on a till when someone took a picture of him that went viral, or The Dress.
Such trends often come about from nowhere, especially to those that don’t spend a lot of time on the social networks that generate them, and so it can be easier to explain them as the work of canny branding rather than inexplicable memes. Once that explanation is in place, it's hard to counteract — so many popular things on the internet are viral marketing stunts that weary cynicism about them is fairly commonplace.
The Independent contacted Warner Brothers, who is distributing the film, to see whether it would confirm or deny how the meme and the film were linked. It hadn’t responded at the time of publishing.
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