From TikTok’s Bloody Mary to Nevermore: How Lady Gaga’s cameo in Wednesday closes the viral circle

Wednesday is not a series that moves with joy, and Wednesday Addams does not dance that way. She jerks, twirls, flings her arms like a marionette possessed by a grinning ghost. The scene in Wednesday is less choreography than invocation, and it hit like a curse spreading through social media’s veins.

TikTok users, forever eager to dress boredom in ritual, seized the moment. They replicated Ortega’s gothic spasms in bathrooms, school gyms, and bedrooms lit by ring lights, each sway of the shoulder a pledge of allegiance to the cult of offbeat.

The original track was The Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck,” a relic of punk psychobilly, but fans did what fans do: they rewrote the rules.

Out of nowhere, Lady Gaga’s “Bloody Mary,” a decade-old deep cut buried on Born This Way, was resurrected and grafted onto Wednesday’s limbs. The song’s beat, slowed and sped until it slithered, became the true score of the viral ritual. It spread like frost on a graveyard fence, one clip after another, until “Bloody Mary” was suddenly inescapable. Spotify streams exploded. Radio DJs unearthed it. Billboard watched it crawl into the Hot 100 as if time itself had folded in on 2011. The meme wasn’t parody or fandom, it was necromancy.

And so, a circle began to form. Ortega’s invented dance. TikTok’s mutation. Gaga’s forgotten hymn. A trinity of goth energy dressed up as trend, functioning more like contagion. What had been an eccentric scene in a Netflix show became a global séance, orchestrated by teenagers with smartphones who, knowingly or not, summoned a pop icon into their ritual.

A dance out of step with time

When Jenna Ortega choreographed Wednesday’s dance herself, she didn’t set out to design an algorithmic weapon. She pulled from archival footage of goth kids in the 1980s, silent film actors, even Siouxsie Sioux. The result was an awkward, unsettling groove that had nothing to do with TikTok’s typical diet of slick, eight-count routines. It was angular, arrhythmic, the sort of thing you’d expect from a girl who thinks school dances should end in arson.

This refusal of smoothness was the hook. TikTok, a platform that thrives on reproducibility, discovered in Ortega’s strange flailing a pattern anyone could copy. The point was not to get it right but to get it wrong in the same way she did. It was a shared language of dissonance. Suddenly, the internet was filled with black blazers, smeared eyeliner, and awkward shoulder thrusts, people relishing the chance to perform discomfort as style.

The irony was sharp. A character who hates conformity spawned one of the most imitated choreographies of the decade. The scene, out of step with time, became the beat to which millions marched. It was nostalgia, parody, sincerity, and performance all at once. The kind of contradiction that only feels natural under dim lighting and in a minor key.

Bloody Mary resurrected by strangers and the connection with Wednesday

Enter “Bloody Mary.” Released in 2011, the song had never been a single, never been canon in the Gaga pantheon. It was the kind of track you skip on a commute and rediscover years later with the sudden shame of neglect. TikTok users, however, heard something else. The song’s hypnotic chorus, dance, dance, dance with my hands, hands, hands, felt genetically engineered to fuse with Ortega’s convulsions. They spliced it in, adjusted the pitch, looped it until it became inseparable from the dance.

The effect was immediate. Millions of clips stacked themselves into a grotesque choir of digital dancers. Each post was another candle in a cathedral of absurd devotion. Spotify recorded millions of daily streams. Radio stations dusted it off. Billboard charted it again. “Bloody Mary” went from dormancy to domination in the time it takes to doomscroll. The undead had been given a beat, and the beat was Gaga’s.

What made it uncanny was the asymmetry. A pop anthem from the past resurrected by people who were children when it was released, married to a scene that was never supposed to feature it. The meme became stronger than the official. The audience declared, without hesitation, that Wednesday Addams danced not to The Cramps, but to Lady Gaga. Culture bent to their will.

Gaga joins the cult she inspired

Lady Gaga could have ignored it. She could have let the fan mashup breathe on its own, a gift from strangers. Instead, she leaned in. On TikTok, Gaga painted her eyes dark, donned the uniform, and performed the dance herself, captioned “BLOODY WEDNESDAY.” The circle tightened. The icon joined the cult her fans had already founded.

Her participation transformed the trend from grassroots to sanctioned liturgy. If Ortega’s dance was the spark and TikTok was the accelerant, Gaga was the gasoline poured lovingly on the flame. The meme no longer belonged to fans alone. It belonged to Gaga, to Netflix, to a cross-platform trinity of corporation, celebrity, and crowd. Gaga’s acknowledgment turned a joke into canon, a parody into prophecy fulfilled.

Jenna Ortega herself seemed stunned. Watching the woman who had once been the soundtrack of her teenage years mimic her own improvised moves was proof that virality had eaten the timeline whole. Gaga wasn’t simply embracing a trend; she was bending it, sanctifying it. The priestess had stepped into the altar her disciples built.

Netflix learns to dance with the dead

Netflix could have left it as internet ephemera. But corporations don’t ignore resurrection when it boosts subscriptions. By Season 2, they had woven Gaga directly into Wednesday. She appeared on screen, spectral and sharp, embodying a new character while gifting the series a fresh track: “The Dead Dance.” Ortega choreographed again, but this time to music written for the show. The meme had become canon, the canon had become meta, and Netflix had learned to dance with its own ghosts.

The stunt worked. Episodes spiked to #1, streams climbed, headlines shouted. Gaga’s cameo was reported not as casting news but as destiny. The undead loop had closed. A pop star dragged into a fan edit had become a plotline. The meme had infected the host body, and the host welcomed it.

For the viewers who had been there since the first TikTok clip, the cameo felt inevitable. The fan energy of the meme had simply been acknowledged, given budget, and filmed. What had been parody was now prophecy. The audience had rewritten the script, and Netflix obeyed.

A monochrome lesson in virality with the Wednesday trend (and show)

The saga of Wednesday and “Bloody Mary” is more than a meme cycle, it’s a gothic parable about how culture now works. A show births a scene. Fans mutate it with the tools of the platform. The algorithm spreads it like contagion. An artist returns to bless it. A corporation closes the loop. The line between canon and fanon collapses into monochrome haze.

What’s striking is not that Gaga joined the Wednesday trends (and show), but that she had to. In an era when fans dictate which relics get resurrected, artists are less gatekeepers than willing participants. The meme doesn’t ask permission. It drags you in. And if you resist, it survives without you. Gaga understood that. By stepping in, she didn’t just approve, she became part of the spell.

Wednesday ends up being the perfect vessel for this story. A girl who thrives in discomfort, who makes awkwardness iconic, who turns a school dance into a ritual, is the ideal mirror for a culture where awkward TikTok clips summon billion-stream hits. The viral circle is closed, but the dance goes on.