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The Internet

4 min readMar 12, 2018

Here’s Johnny Meme

In movie, The Shining the main villain Johnny scares his wife by breaking down a door with an ax and screaming the line “Here’s Johnny”, while breaking the door (1). As a popular movie the scene was the most iconic. It was recreated on youtube through mashes and one of the first recreation was done by Dan Parks using Legos (2). This video remixes, the famous scene as way to recreate the scare feel of the scene while making fun of it. Other remixes were made on youtube and other methods of pop culture decided to recreate the scene in different way. One video on youtube mashed together scene from different TV shows and and movies recreating the iconic scene (3).

In the Here’s Johnny meme, it highlights Nooney’s and Portwood-Stacer’s argument that the culture of memes does is meant to be reshareable. In the reading, they argue that “in meme culture, flow takes primacy over origin, as the creator of an object and even the conditions in which it was made often remain unknown to the legions of users who remix it and pass it on” ( Nooney and Potwood-Stacer, PDF). This reading highlights the transferability of meme, which is reflected in the Here’s Johnny meme. In the Nooney reading, it describes how the word, meme refers to culture that is shared in different context. The original scene from the movie grew to a reference of being used in pop culture. It started being used as general reference to individuals being viewed as normal and then showing their craziness.

Once, here’s Johnny was translated into a gif, most of the gifs did not include any subtext, most only included a remix of the original scene. As a meme, it does not need words to communicate the idea of a personal losing their mind. Even without seeing the movie, one can see from the gifs that this person has lost their mind, as usually the gifs included a person with crazy eyes sticking their head through a door. This allows for the meme to feel universal and allowing fans of the Shining to have a wide audience. This allows their videos to be understood by more people and allowing the meme to have the potential of going viral on the internet. Also due to the popularity of the scene from the movie, it allows the meme to feel more creative. Most meme that are reshared on Facebook are a stock image with the text. These meme are shared all over and image usually stays the same, but the text differs. In the Here’s Johnny meme, some images are hand drawn and reshared. Even when using stock images, there are usually different images from different places while still keeping true to the original scene from the movie. This allows the meme to have more creative and individual feel that not usually associated with meme as they are meant to be shared over and over. Due to this the meme has a context amongst creators to find the creepiest face, in order for their meme to be distinct. Overall, the meme is universal in the meaning, but it references to how and why a particularly person is creepy is distinctive to a community. For example, the a image from the movie Willy Wonka was used in one of the memes. A particular community finds Willy Wonka, creep and why that is only makes sense to that community as Willy Wonka is suppose to a be a friendly candy store man.