Following the recent release of Pokemon Legends: Arceus on the Nintendo Switch, interest in the Pokemon franchise has reached heights arguably unseen since the debut of Pokemon GO more than five years prior. Breaking the established structure instituted in the original Game Boy titles, Pokemon Legends: Arceus challenges fans to think of their favorite franchise in new ways, something that TikTok creator the.revival took to heart with their otherworldly Pokemon animations.
Their most recent TikTok post is a short first-person adventure through The Backrooms, a creepypasta-adjacent internet creation that envisions an infinite series of fluorescent-lit, yellow-stained hallways of vague malignance. Prowling these hallways, always dashing just out of frame like something from The Blair Witch Project is a dark purple phantom Pokemon fans know to be Haunter. In the finale of the roughly thirty-second long clip, the creature shows itself, offering a vicious staredown before attacking the camera. Of course, Haunter also appears in Pokemon Legends: Arceus.
The animation is amazingly reminiscent of a recent viral YouTube hit titled “The Backrooms (Found Footage),” a horror short film that has amassed more than thirteen million views over the course of one month. A nine-minute sequence that sees a hapless cameraman stumble into an unending maze of hallways, it’s a paralyzing watch which packs quite a bit of terror into its short runtime. TikTok user the.revival’s rendition may not be quite as complex, but it's arguably the scariest use of a Pokemon since Gigantamax Garbodor from Pokemon Sword and Shield.
One day ahead of their Haunter animation, the.revival posted an equally-enthralling first-person exploration of a haunted mansion starring Gastly. It’s not quite as unnerving as its follow-up—though the creature in question is a good bit more fiendish than it's usually made out to be—but the artistry on display in the clip is nonetheless impressive.
Beyond these two posts, the.revival has a suite of other Pokemon-centric animations which aren’t quite as terrifying. From ice-shattering and boulder-smashing adaptations of Regice and Regirock—a Pokemon that recently stepped into the five-star raid ring in Pokemon GO— to realistic renderings of Porygon and Kabutops, there’s a wild, uncanny nature to these TikToks which make them appear to blend the lines between video game and reality. In a way, these posts make for a more authentic augmented reality experience than Pokemon GO might ever manage.
These posts are strikingly similar to the creations of well-known TikTok animator Lights.Are.Off, who bases much of their work on so-called liminal space horror. Like the.revival, they have incorporated video game horror icons like Freddy Fazbear, one of the four major animatronics from the Five Nights At Freddy's series, and the creature from Poppy’s Playtime into their works, and the two seem to be at the forefront of a new genre of horror on social media which twists nostalgic concepts into uncanny horrors.