In the indie thriller 12 Feet Deep, two sisters find themselves trapped beneath a heavy fiberglass cover in a pool. They struggle, they plead, they even negotiate with a janitor who ends up betraying them. I discovered all of this on TikTok, where I’ve been seeing clips of this obscure, low-budget film circulating on the platform for months. Despite being released six years ago to minimal attention (having zero mentions from professional critics on its Rotten Tomatoes page), 12 Feet Deep is slowly gaining popularity, one clip at a time. A two-minute clip shared on TikTok in January garnered over 90 million views. To put that in perspective, approximately 95 million people watched the O.J. Simpson police chase live in 1994.
Admittedly, this is an unconventional way to watch a film. However, enigmatic movie-clip accounts have emerged on TikTok, stitching together films like 12 Feet Deep into multiple parts that users can watch on their phones. This phenomenon highlights how our platforms can shape our media consumption habits, intentionally or unintentionally, and how their limitations can give rise to peculiar online cultures.
The process generally unfolds like this: an account divides a film or TV show into smaller sections and labels each part. Some of these posts gain traction in TikTok’s algorithm. Suddenly, a user scrolling through TikTok’s main feed stumbles upon, let’s say, Part 8 of That Film From Six Years Ago. Intrigued, they watch the two-minute clip and thirst for more, so they start searching for Part 9, usually conveniently linked in the comments section.
Instead of channel surfing, these users engage in comment surfing. They dive into the comment section to find the next clip, and the next, and the next. Those who spend significant time on TikTok may find themselves watching substantial portions of movies or TV shows in this manner, becoming like digital Hansels and Gretels following a trail of sequential crumbs. Most of these films and TV shows are old; some evoke nostalgia, while others appear entirely random.
This isn’t necessarily an efficient way to consume media. Why not just stream something on Netflix instead of piecing it together from 10 different TikTok clips? Nevertheless, many people are captivated by this method. Accounts that post movies have close to a million followers, and individual movie clips gain hundreds of thousands of likes and millions of views. These clips have an eccentric style: some overlay unrelated songs to set the mood (potentially boosting the post’s visibility through popular audio clips), while others feature AI-like captions. In a subgenre, robotic narrators awkwardly describe the on-screen events.
Much of this comment-surfing phenomenon revolves around shameless engagement tactics, where old media is repurposed to earn likes, comments, views, and followers. A popular movie TikToker named Cinema Joe (real name: Joe Aragon) estimates that around half of the accounts posting these clips are solely seeking attention and exploiting the content to bolster their own metrics.
Crystal Abidin, a professor at Curtin University and the founder of the TikTok Cultures Research Network, affirms that similar behavior can be observed on YouTube, where movie and TV show clip accounts are typically managed by fans curating clips from their favorite shows, such as Grey’s Anatomy, for other enthusiasts to enjoy. As these accounts gain subscribers, they often secure sponsorship or advertising deals. Abidin makes a distinction between genuine curatorial accounts, driven by established fan or community traditions, and spam accounts. On TikTok, the spam accounts may share only “Part 15” of a movie, tricking users into searching for a non-existent “Part 16” to boost engagement. In another ploy, clips of Family Guy are juxtaposed with random craft videos, ensuring viewers’ attention bounces back and forth between the two. This is known as “sludge content” and is specifically designed to extend viewership and improve a video’s performance.
Channel surfing was a common occurrence in the era of broadcast television, where viewers mindlessly flipped through channels, often joining shows or movies already in progress due to the lack of control over the broadcasting schedule. In the social media age, every “channel” presents algorithmically optimized clips designed to hook and retain your attention. The result is a barrage of captivating moments—from movies, news, or everyday life—anxious to capture your focus. “It’s not just a TikTok problem or a Gen-Z problem,” Abidin explains. “It’s a result of how we need to capture attention differently now that our media landscape is so saturated.”
Carl Marci, a psychiatrist, consumer-neuroscience researcher, and author of “Rewired: Protecting Your Brain in the Digital Age,” isn’t surprised that people consume movies in this fragmented way, considering the prevalence of shorter media consumption today. Marci describes the world of TikTok as mostly centered around titillation, aiming to find ways to grab and sustain viewers’ attention. Stories, whether in films, novels, TV shows, or magazine articles, follow narrative arcs that build tension and provide release. TikTok movie clips disrupt these arcs entirely.
However, the existence of comment-surfing accounts may reveal a collective dissatisfaction with the storytelling constraints imposed by platforms. TikTok, for example, limits videos to a duration of 10 minutes or less. Juju Green, the curator of the movie account Straw Hat Goofy boasting over 3 million followers, finds it amusing how TikTok initially catered to the shorter attention spans of the younger generation but has now become a platform where people spend over an hour and a half watching a full movie.
To gain insight into how the director of 12 Feet Deep, Matt Eskandari, feels about his film being reimagined this way, I reached out to him. While he had questions about potential monetization (he assumes these accounts profit from his movie somehow), he seemed relatively unfazed by it. In fact, he was pleased to see his film gaining renewed attention on social media long after its initial release. Eskandari expressed his satisfaction as a filmmaker, stating, “If people are still making clips about the film … 10 years from now, that’s great. I love that.”
I confessed to Eskandari that, despite encountering numerous TikTok clips of his film on my feed, I had never seen 12 Feet Deep in its entirety. I informed him of my plan to watch it later that day on Amazon, and I followed through. Afterward, I felt a sense of fulfillment—glad to finally know the ending but also content that I had dedicated my attention to something slightly longer, as a small protest against the vortex of the modern attention economy. And just for those curious, the sisters make it out alive in the end.
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