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Even Lady Gaga and Camila Cabello are getting in on it.
Need some new moves? Tune in to Wednesday, Tim Burton’s Addams Family spinoff on Netflix, and take notes.
It’s become a trend.
In episode 4 of the monster hit, Wednesday Addams shows off some seriously iconic moves during a dance at Nevermore Academy, the school for outcasts where she keeps busy being sarcastic and trying to halt a beast on a murder spree. And the internet has taken notice.
All over TikTok, people are doing their own versions of the kooky dance, which involves tossing back your head, looking skyward with wide, unblinking eyes and flinging your arms side to side and up and down like an unhinged robot.
It’s part Argentine tango, part spooky shimmy and part C-3PO trying to let loose.
Dancing is one of my favorite things to do. Along with gravedigging, conducting autopsies, and glaring uncomfortably. pic.twitter.com/q5sHhp82Rr
“This is now I’m gonna dance at every party from now on,” writes a TikTok user whose version of the deadpan dance has gotten more than 116 million views. Dressed in all black, as Wednesday Addams always is, the TikTok’er looks remarkably like Jenna Ortega, who plays the morose lead character in the Netflix show and choreographed the dance in real life.
Ortega’s moves clearly pay homage to other classic Addams Family moments, like one where the original Wednesday teaches Lurch to dance in the macabre ’60s sitcom and another where matriarch Morticia Addams stiffly cuts the rug in the 1991 movie The Addams Family.
This is how i’m gonna dance at every party from now on #wednesday #wednesdayaddams
In the Netflix dark comedy, Ortega dances to the 1981 song Goo Goo Muck by The Cramps, but many on TikTok are going with Lady Gaga’s Bloody Mary (“I’m gonna dance dance dance with my hands hands hands”). The lyrics fit the dance’s stylized hand movements and nod to Wednesday’s loyal pal Thing, a disembodied hand who also guest-stars in a number of the Tik Tok dances. Gaga herself has even gotten in on the trend.
Enjoy these renditions of Wednesday’s dance, including one by pop artist Camila Cabello, one done in ice skates and one in the style of a classical Indian dance, and then go practice your own moves using a TikTok tutorial, which include one by a professional dancer.
As my CNET colleague Joan E. Solsman reports, Wednesday is now Netflix’s third most watched show of all time, in any language. Expect to see lots of Wednesday Addams cosplay and ghoulish gyrations in the days and months ahead.