I've noticed a lot of people are doing stuff again like the hallway mirror thing at night or the candle game with friends. It's gotten huge on social media for like the past 2 years. Is there some cultural reason behind it or is it just for the hype?
Summoning rituals and games have always been around in schoolyards and sleepovers, but TikTok just brought them back by filming them - they're buzzing because they're creepy to watch, and teens love that. There's not really a new cultural reason, it's mostly that social media amplifies what was already there, and now people are finding out their friends all went through the same weird stuff.
You've gotta consider that people are looking for stuff to do together IRL right now, like a break from the endless scrolling, so rituals are perfect for that - they're social, they're free, and they create suspense. After that TikTok just amplifies it because filming something potentially scary always works well for views.
There's one thing nobody really mentions: it's not just nostalgia or hype, it's also that these rituals create a kind of personal challenge with a "testable" result. Like, you do the thing, something happens (or doesn't), and boom you get an answer. In a world where everything's fuzzy and algorithmic, it's reassuring to have a scenario with clear rules, even if they're terrible rules. And the fact that it's a bit creepy makes sharing the video more interesting than yet another dance trend.
After all, it's true that TikTok basically just amplified something that already existed in schoolyards. But where it's different is the instant validation - you're not just hanging out with your friends laughing in the dark, you're also showing 50k people that you're not scared. It's an extra layer of performance.
One thing that can help if you want to participate without actually believing in the supernatural: look at these rituals as a creativity game rather than an invocation. Why not create your own "homemade version" with weird but fun rules, then share how you intentionally broke the thing? Plenty of people do that and it blows up too, without needing to pretend to be actually scared.
The thing is, these rituals work because they play on anxiety and curiosity at the same time - you're scared but you really want to see if it's actually gonna happen, and that's exactly the kind of content that blows up on TikTok. Plus there's genuine nostalgia for stuff we used to do back when we weren't glued to social media all the time, so people are rediscovering them and sharing them around.
What you need to avoid is reducing it to just "it was already there before." Yeah, rituals existed, but what's really changing is the scale and how TikTok transformed them into a *format*. Before, you'd play the hallway mirror game with your friends in the dark, it was local, limited to your crew. Now, millions of people do the exact same thing at the exact same time, film themselves, compare their results. That creates this kind of collective validation that didn't exist before. And honestly, I think there's also an element of control in there: in a world where you feel like you can't control anything, doing a ritual is like saying "I can at least try to conjure up something supernatural," even if you rationally know it's not real.
The psychology behind all this is more subtle than just "it's scary so it works." It's that a ritual gives you a narrative. You have a beginning, precise rules, a potential ending. Unlike endless scrolling that kicks you from one topic to another in two seconds, a ritual forces you to stay in that tension for 5, 10, 15 minutes. And in our super fragmented era, that feels good, even if you're absolutely terrified doing it. The stranger and more folkloric it is, the more it attracts people because it seems "authentic" - like it's a real secret we're sharing, not artificial content. That's why trends disappear fast: the moment it gets too mainstream, it's no longer secret, no longer creepy, and people start hunting for the next obscure ritual to try.
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