TikTok Trends Forecast Forecast: That Slow Dance in ‘Fresh’

Predicting how a moderately viral clip will be obsessed over ad nauseam

A man and a woman dancing in a dark room.
'Fresh': Searchlight Pictures
Jenny G. Zhang
Love Bites

This is TikTok Trends Forecast Forecast, an occasional series in which we prematurely predict how internet trend culture writers will cover trending TikToks.

In early March, the movie Fresh was released on Hulu. It is, as I understand it, a comedy-horror-thriller about a young woman (Daisy Edgar-Jones) who begins dating a hot guy (Sebastian Stan) who is also a consumer and butcher of human meat (in common parlance, a cannibal). In the weeks since the film’s release, it has started to gain steam on TikTok, primarily through a clip of the main characters dancing to the beat of a sped-up version of Demi Lovato’s 2015 song “Cool for the Summer,” which is not actually the music used in the movie. Edgar-Jones, in particular, looks inexplicably mesmerizing; Stan, as is typical for handsome men 6 feet or taller, skates by with minimal effort:

You get the point.

This trend does not seem to have hit mainstream news coverage yet, but it’s only a matter of time. The forecast predicts that a trickle of aggregated posts will start to emerge from the blogosphere within the next 36 hours. Here are some directions that coverage could go:

  • “TikTok Is OBSESSED With Hulu Movie ‘Fresh’ Dancing Scene”
  • “How to Dance Like ‘Fresh’ Actress Daisy Edgar-Jones”
  • “Sebastian Stan: ‘I Can’t Dance Like [Daisy] Can,’ Admits to Having Two Left Feet”
  • “We’ve Got Daisy Edgar-Jones and Seb Stan’s Bodies on Our Mind: New Viral TikTok Trend Has the Internet Sweating”
  • “Body-Language Expert Weighs in on Why Daisy Edgar-Jones Is So Alluring in ‘Fresh’ Dance”
  • “You’ll NEVER Guess What Happens Next After Viral ‘Fresh’ Dance Scene (Hint: It’s Gory!!!)”
  • “TikTok-Famous ‘Fresh’ Dance Sequence Romanticizes Cannibalism and Violence Against Women”
  • “Viral ‘Fresh’ Dance Sequence Erases Original Creator of Dance — Who Is a Doctor!”
  • “This Year We’re Leaving Behind Dance Gatekeeping: Why the ‘Fresh’ Dance Belongs to All of Us”
  • “Charli D’Amelio Slays ‘Fresh’ Dance on TikTok, Promotes Face Positivity in No-Makeup Minimal Makeup Look”
  • “Daisy Edgar-Jones Teaches Jimmy Fallon TikTok-Viral ‘Fresh’ Dance on The Tonight Show”
  • “Jimmy Fallon Hospitalized After Hip Injury Sustained While Learning How to Dance With ‘Fresh’ Actress”

This concludes the second TikTok trends forecast forecast of 2022.