You open TikTok like any other day and scroll down your for you page and open the comment section and see hundreds of comments all with one thing in common.
“OMG! You look like Alaine from Zepotha!”
“Does anyone else think he looks a little like Danny from Zepotha!”
“This aesthetic reminds me so much of Zepotha!”
But what is Zepotha?
Sorry to be the bearer of disappointing news, but Zepotha isn’t real. The extensive lore, soundtrack, characters, and edits are all made up. The reality of the Zepotha universe, is that it’s a fan made franchise that help catapult an independent artist’s music career.
Emily Jeffri, the 18-year-old artist in question, orchestrated this project. Jeffri, known for her alternative indie music style, posted a TikTok on August 12th, that kickstarted one of the biggest inside jokes on TikTok. The post, a video of her with a paragraph detailing the idea, reads “what if we created a fake 80’s horror movie called Zepotha […] we can convince thousands of people that this weirdly titled 80’s horror film actually exists.” The trend quickly spread across TikTok, in most comment sections you would see thousands of mentions of this fictional film. Other than just comments, posts began to be put up about Zepotha. Many creators began to make videos surrounding the lore, detailing each character’s death, the setting and different scenes in the movie. Almost overnight the hashtag #Zepotha had just about 240 million views.
Most of these videos were underneath the same audio, which was dubbed the Zepotha anthem. The audio features a snippet of the song “Do You Remember Me”’ by Jeffri. This is no coincidence. Jeffri curated the idea of Zepotha to promote her new 80’s inspired album, Soundtrack for an 80’s Horror Movie. Many creators using the sound gave her more exposure for her music career.
To add onto the Zepotha craze, Jeffri announced a short film contest for filmmakers to take inspiration from the 80’s synth horror aesthetic. The addition of the TikTok film community’s support helped Jeffri’s song “Do You Remember Me”’ amass over 275,365 streams. Other songs from the album have seen success. The song “Where Are They Now???,” released as a single September 1st, 2022, has over 10 million streams.
The idea of fake movies isn’t new to the internet though, Goncharov, dubbed as Tumblr’s fake Martin Scorsese film has made its rounds as well. Some people even argue that it did the fake ploy better than Zepotha. To some, Zepotha is too disorganized, and non-repetitive. Each post about it follows a relative story, but they lack a lot of the same details. The lore changes a little bit each time. Goncharov had more of a continuous story all around, since it was planned within a relatively smaller social media community, Tumblr, compared to TikTok.
Another critique that users have is Zepotha being a stealth marketing ploy. Some feel like it’s annoying, that almost everything nowadays is an advertisement for something else. “The Zepotha rumor was started by the artist who sings the song that all the vids use, it’s literally one big marketing campaign,” one user expresses.
Ultimately, Jeffri’s idea was undoubtedly successful, and she even figured out a way to bring in another demographic of people to hopefully make Zepotha a reality.
