You Open Tiktok to find a woman rushing towards you in her kitchen. “My parents are coming over,” she informs you, her jaw snapping open and shut like a stork swallowing a fish, “can you help me clean?”
Two dialog options will appear. A mouse cursor hovers over “No thanks” before settling on “Of course dear.” But the next few moments of the 30-second video, which has garnered 16 million views since it was posted in December, leave you uneasy. Though the cursor quickly clicks away piles of trash, it also opens the oven to find a burned whole chicken covered in scaly soot. “Oh dear,” says the woman, “now I have to feed them something… different.” The screen turns red. You are now stuck in the haunted world of OnlyFans and TikTok creator Molly Moon.
Moon, who didn’t respond my city‘s request for comment in time for publication was posted to OnlyFans and Instagram since 2021 and stuck to what you would expect for a while: Milkmaid Blouses, mall fitting room thirst traps, and occasional PornHub uploads. In 2022, however, she began releasing her horror-game-inspired “creations,” as she calls them, regularly a second Instagram and on TikTok to reveal the handsome cannibal inside.
“Excuse me, sir,” you begin many by Moons first attempts to unnerve the first-person perspective videos. They would all follow a formula at first and come to a dreaded conclusion within seconds as Molly prepares to lock you inside her brick basementor their apartmentor to suggest that she will bake you in her banana bread.
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“I’m terrified now,” said a popular comment on these videos, in which Moon’s tennis skirts and fluttering false eyelashes stretch against the empty playgrounds and woodland she films. But it also attracts victims and spectatorsMoon’s clothing reveals her horror influences – in some videos, Moon wears them a similar sweater to the famous Baby Gap Zipper Megan Fox wore in the 2009 film She Eats Boys, Jennifer’s body. In othershe looks like the scrawny corpse bride preparing her involuntary chosen one for eternal, unholy marriage.
Positioning Moon within this broader horror canon moves her towards point-and-click style pixel horror – all reminiscent of indie studio Puppet Combo’s low-poly horror games, many of Moon’s comments will inform you – feels himself of course.
These newer videos add production value and deviate from Moon’s original “sorry sir” format while retaining the dangerous first-person perspective. They force you to interact with a rather lo-fien Moon—her voice more metallic, as if coming from behind the closed basement door, her body ragged and squared at the edges, as if copied and placed on a Windows 98 desktop been inserted – as they punishes you for clicking “right” instead of “left” or when her health bar fills up as soon as you select a rose from your inventory to hand over. Then she feeds the flower to her toothed purse.
Those videos that look like games are by far the most popular 13 million views, 15 million viewsor 22 million views if they don’t come Flagged for “disturbing” content. Since she started posting them in November, they’ve also been motivating fan art to imagine what’s real Molly moon Game would be like and leading game developers To Please allow them to create it.
That seems like the logical next step for Moon. In the Horror developer Airdorfwho didn’t respond my city‘s request for comment in time for publication, teased a gif from what looks like a full game earlier this week. In the GIF, a moon with pigtails stares at three tarot cards while three others face the player – Airdorf, Moon, and Monster Prom Manufacturer Jesse Cox all involved are revealed by the cards when read backwards.
I’m excited about the popularity of Moon and what it could mean for horror games that are often held down by tropes similar to horror movies, such as: useless hot girlsand villains whose evilness is related to their performance ideal femininity. Moon’s videos also enhance the ideas of more subversive horror games, such as Lollipop Chainsawby removing their predators and to put them in their own hands – in the hands of a woman, for the execution of a woman. Her videos do not allow women to act as both prey and predator, only as a predator disguised as a glass-eyed rabbit.
It’s time for games to uproot their old narratives. As Amanda Seyfried says in Jennifer’s bodyI’ve always known that “hell is a teenage girl”.
