TAG ME IF YOU DARE

The first time Mara says it, she’s sprawled across a velvet headboard with her ring light doing the most, lip gloss shining like she’s sponsored by peach candy and audacity. She is five foot three on a good day, five foot four if she lies in Doc Martens. She looks right into the camera like she’s got the algorithm on payroll and says, “I could definitely take Jeepers Creepers. All five-three of me—five-four, whatever. I got hands.”

She posts it with unserious-ass hashtags—#FinalGirlEnergy #DontArgueWithShortWomen #CreeperChallenge—and throws the phone on the bed like she didn’t just poke the supernatural with a mascara wand.

I’m Dakota. I saw it live. I see too much on that app; my thumbs are nosy and my Wi-Fi ain’t paid to be holy. I know hype when I see it and omen when I smell it. This was cologne and sulfur.

Eleven minutes later, the duet drops.

The account name is @TheRealCreeper—and I hate how official it looks. The video opens in pitch dark, like basement breath. A gloved hand lifts a printed photo of Mara. The audio is a mournful 90s beat (y’all know the one), turned down low like a threat humming under a blanket. At the end, right before the cut, the camera stutters and catches a blurry street sign—one that only matters if you’ve ever walked two blocks past the coffee shop with the dry lavender scones Mara loves too much.

Mara laughs out loud on her follow-up, because how else do you hold steady on a deck that suddenly tilts? “Green screen is cute,” she says. “You did the homework.”

And then comments come in like little insects with Wi-Fi: queen I believe in you, girl delete the app, lol ok but skincare routine??, the sign in the back tho? The stitches start, the edits start, the think pieces start—“could a short queen take a folkloric carnivore? let’s discuss”—and the duets multiply like gnats.

By morning, Mara has five duets from “fan” accounts with production value that smells like a crime scene. There’s a lake at night filmed so steady you feel the cold. There’s a bathroom mirror that fogs up even though the faucet isn’t on. There’s a porch light, and next to it, a man the color of NO standing too still to be polite.

She goes Live to show she’s not pressed, which is the universal sign for being lightly pressed. “Everybody relax,” she says, giggling like a warning light. “If a demon wants smoke, meet me at the Taco Bell parking lot. I’m ordering a Crunchwrap and bringing the hands.”

Chat is chaos.

bestie he’s dueting you again
girl don’t joke w/ the dead they joke back
drop a tutorial for those baby hairs pls
NAH FR LOOK BEHIND U

Behind her window, a red balloon just—floats by. Lazy. Casual. Mara turns and it’s gone, like a blink you imagined. “Cute filter,” she tells us, but her shoulders stiffen.

Her DMs ping. A politely thirsty message pops from @FilmClassDropout: Hey Mara! Love the channel. Doing a doc on horror fandom—quick 10-min interview? Bio full of grainy film stills and essay-length captions about Carpenter. Looks safe if you only believe fonts.

Before she can respond, another duet hits the page. @CampCrystal4Life posts a long, steady shot of lake water and there’s a reflection on the surface that turns into steel when you squint. The caption is: Almost there. I don’t like when captions sound like breath on the back of your neck.

She presses the phone button down and the phone turns itself back on. Because of course it does.

By noon, she finds a feather in her kitchen drawer. Not chicken. Not craft store. It’s slick and dark and smells like the wet side of a barn. She snaps a pic to her group chat. Y’all. I need pepper spray and maybe a priest.

“Maybe move in with your auntie-n-them for a week?” one friend suggests. Another sends a link for a stun gun disguised as lipstick. Mara buys hairspray—the cheap kind that is, frankly, just aerosol regret—and practices flicking a lighter.

Then there’s the Pinhead duet. It starts with static like a TV forgot how to be. He speaks in bedtime-story tone about pain and devotion and followers. She blocks him. It unblocks itself. She says “oh, okay” like a person in therapy choosing calm instead of public meltdown.

The group chat that isn’t supposed to exist is alive as a nest:

“Killin’ Time ☠️🔥” – TUES 9:48 PM

Freddy: So the pipsqueak said she could take Creeper. LMAOOO
Jason: 🔪🔪 (sends a 3-sec shaky clip of a lake)
Pennywise: Jason I swear to god get a tripod 😂 pass me that location tho
Pinhead: Art is not stable. Pain refuses tripods.
Freddy: Lord he wrote a poem.
Michael: (photo: Mara’s door with fresh locks)
Freddy: She added locks, Mike.
Michael: 🔑🔪
Ghostface: Who wants a teaser? I got b-roll of her in Sephora two days ago.
Creeper: 👁️ (a blurry still: Mara’s tacos, extra lime, a stained napkin)
Freddy: Oh he bold at the taquería 😭



All week, TikTok turns into a haunted group project. I watch like everybody else, though my thumb hovers near the little “x” that never did shit for anybody. The page refreshes and there’s a duet of Mara’s street two nights ago, edited like a music video, with a slow pan and the caption: We see you. Another shows her favorite coffee shop, but the camera doesn’t go inside; it hangs out across the street like a man who likes the word linger too much. Jeepers posts videos that look like the inside of a silo—ribbed, dark, dusty—and always ends on a long inhale. He’s not chasing; he’s sampling the air like a sommelier.

Mara tries to keep it funny. Funny is the weapon that kills with plausible deniability. She films a lip tutorial—gloss called Final Girl. She films a get-ready-with-me—denim, boots, black tee, curls that could slice bread. She sprinkles in the clapbacks the app likes. “Y’all say stop summoning things,” she says. “I say pay me. Demons don’t work for free either.”

The app starts glitching. Her comments reorder themselves. A filter turns on unprompted and drops static snow in the background like her living room is a bad channel. She checks her router and the router gives her back a red light like a side eye. She calls her bestie. “I’m fine,” she says in the voice women use when they are not fully fine but refuse to be the plot. She orders takeout and the receipt says, SEE YOU SOON, printed in tiny, greasy font.

That night, the group chat is messy:

“Killin’ Time ☠️🔥” – WED 12:17 AM

Freddy: Strategy time. We look sloppy. We need beats.
Pinhead: Suffering’s choreography is instinct.
Freddy: Say one more SAT word.
Michael: (photo: empty street, shot through blinds)
Pennywise: I’m doing a balloon drop on her block tomorrow. Confetti inside. 😋
Jason: 🔪 (drops an image: a calendar with HALLOWEEN circled)
Ghostface: I got the interview ask in her DMs. She typing like she gonna say yes.
Creeper: 🕯️ (posts a six-sec clip: the silhouette of a batlike wing brushing a doorway)
Freddy: On god don’t bring wings to the live. She gonna roast you.



Mara tells herself not to flinch. She flinches anyway. Only a little—it’s darting eyes, it’s double-checking the lock after you already tugged it. She keeps posting because artists in this economy do what they must, which is feed the beast and hope it doesn’t eat you. She buys a second ring light like extra halo equals extra protection.

Two days before Halloween, a duet hits that makes me sit up straight on my couch. @TheRealCreeper posts a split-screen with Mara’s I could take him video on the left and a rural road at blue hour on the right. The camera inches forward like a car creeping, and there’s a billboard with a barely legible ad that only means something if you notice the lower corner: No Left Turn—the exact sticker on the pole next to Mara’s bus stop. The caption is just an eye emoji. The sound is a low hum that might be engine, might be throat.

Mara goes Live in the afternoon to make it a joke personally. “I live in America,” she says. “You think I’m scared of a street with no sidewalk? Pfft.” She smiles, too wide, too glittery, and someone in the comments says girl your laugh sounds like a scream wearing lip gloss and I want to hug a stranger.

“Killin’ Time ☠️🔥” – THU 7:03 PM

Freddy: She’s online. Penny, you ready with the balloon gag?
Pennywise: On me 😈
Jason: 🔪🔪🔪
Michael: (photo: an aisle of hardware store—locks, screws, a key machine in the background)
Freddy: Sir.
Pinhead: One admires her devotion to the ritual of defense. Locks are rosaries for the anxious.
Freddy: I’m blocking you.
Ghostface: Trailer title ideas: Duet From Hell, Tag Me If You Dare, The Collab.
Creeper: 👁️ (sends a photo: Mara’s reflection in a storefront window—taken from across the street)



Halloween rolls in pretty and insulting. Sunlight like a liar, sky crisp enough to drink. Kids wobble down sidewalks in polyester. Driveways fog like low-budget haunted houses. Mara’s apartment smells like hairspray and lemon cleaner and denial. She’s in denim and boots and a black tee, hair a soft halo of curls that look like they bite.

Her Live title is FINAL GIRL ENERGY (ft. y’all haters) and ten thousand people enter in thirty seconds. I’m one of those tiny faces, popcorn in lap, finger hovering on volume. Chat zooms like a slot machine caught on win.

queen
ok Laurie Strode vibes i see u
BEHIND YOU I SWEAR TO GOD
turn the music up i can’t hear the ghost

“Ground rules,” she says, and smiles like a person who knows it’s about to be chaos and is trying to appear as the boss. “If a licensed monster joins the Live, keep the comments respectful.” She laughs, and the ring light buzzes like a bug stuck in an old lightbulb.

Something breathes near her mic. Slow. Measured. Not trying to scare—just trying to be heard. She doesn’t turn. Her eyes flick left and right like she’s counting off a choreography. The app glitches and adds a filter that makes the corners of the room grainy like VCR footage. The chat starts typing the same sentence: don’t turn around don’t turn around don’t turn around and then three people type turn around because the internet is a group project and someone always writes their name on your part.

She steps sideways, off-frame, and comes back with a frying pan like she’s rehearsed the bit. We laugh because of course we do, but my skin tightens a half size smaller.

Down her hallway, the mirror fogs over in a smooth, rude curve. A single gloved claw draws a line through the fog and then another. The mirror grins with scratches like a childish face. You hear a chuckle that isn’t fully in the room and isn’t fully in the phone. It’s in the space where signals fold into each other.

Mara doesn’t squeal. She keeps the Live steady and walks toward the mirror with pan in one hand, phone in the other, and that look five-three women get when the world forgets how small is a trick, not a limit.

She smashes the glass. The chuckle hiccups like feedback then dies. Chat loses its entire mind in forty-eight languages. THAT’S MY COUSIN, someone says, which, sure.

“Killin’ Time ☠️🔥” – HALLOWEEN 9:12 PM

Freddy: Not the pan.
Jason: 🔪😂
Pennywise: She cute 😋 I bet she floats pretty
Pinhead: There is poetry in cookware becoming blade.
Freddy: PUT ME BACK IN THE MIRROR
Michael: (photo: the empty spot where the mirror used to be)
Freddy: rude.



A red balloon bobbles into frame and pops like a soap bubble kissed by God. Pennywise giggles somewhere in the audio track and then says “we all float in your comments, Mara,” and three hundred people type blocked simultaneously like the world’s pettiest exorcism.

Mara flicks her lighter and sends hairspray into the air; the flame pats the doorway and licks the wall. Somewhere off-screen, a yelp shrinks like it went down a drain. She counts “two” under her breath, not for us, for herself, so later she’ll know she tried.

“Killin’ Time ☠️🔥” – 9:14 PM

Pennywise: SHE SET ME ON FIRE. I HATE HER.
Freddy: LMAOOOOOO
Pinhead: Initiation always costs.
Jason: 🔪👍
Michael: (photo: a door crack, taken from within a dark room—her living room?)
Freddy: Mike is in the house. We doin it live.
Creeper: 👁️ (goes Live; posts split-screen duet with Mara’s Live)
Ghostface: Screen-recording. This trailer cuts itself.



The lights do not go out this time. This is not that kind of story; this is TikTok, not the power grid. But the audio does something ugly, a grinding whine like a 56k modem possessed by grief. The ring light flickers. The chat lags and repeats the same five lines like it’s trying to pray without learning the words.

In the background of Mara’s Live, beyond the wreath of ring light halo and split-screen hum, a shape stands in polite rudeness. Jumpsuit. Knife. Mask. Head tilt that says “I am patient and you are small.” Michael breathes like a metronome with PTSD.

Mara slides her phone a little to the right so the frame catches more hallway than man. “We talked about respect,” she says, voice steady in a way that also feels like shaking at a frequency too high for audio. “This is my house. If you ain’t cash-apping for the light bill, you can exit.”

Chat: I AM SHAKING / SHE SAID CASH APP / GIRL STOP PLAYING / DO NOT PROVOKE HIM

The duet on the other side of the screen shows the Creeper’s silhouette and that printed photo tearing precisely down the middle, like it’s teaching scissors how to hold a prophecy. He inhales and phones in seven cities croak in sympathy. Mara’s feeds buffer just long enough for your stomach to throw itself against your spine.

She does not run. She won’t give the algorithm that gift. She raises the pan an inch and hitches it like she knows exactly how much swing is in her shoulder. “Third thing,” she says to no one and everyone. “I don’t block— I banish.”

“Killin’ Time ☠️🔥” – 9:16 PM

Freddy: She said banish like a librarian with a Glock 😭
Jason: 🔪 (posts a GIF of a cat knocking over a glass)
Pennywise: SEND ME HER ADDRESS I WANNA RING THE BELL AND RUN
Pinhead: Address is material. Scent is truth.
Freddy: Pins if you don’t go journal that
Michael: (reacts 👍)
Creeper: 🕯️👁️ (pin comment on his Live: #SeeYouSoon)



Mara steps back into the living room, keeps the phone high, and lets a smile cut her face into a better weapon. She says, “For the record, I can take Jeepers Creepers.” And then she sets the phone down on the mantle, angled to catch the whole room, and walks out of frame. We watch an empty stage like we’re waiting for a magician to come back with a tiger.

The app decides to be an accomplice and throws the comment feed into hyperdrive: I CAN’T SEE / WHERE SHE GO / TURN THE PHONE / OH HELL NAW—and in the middle of the blur, one account with a fresh username and zero followers writes, look out your window, and I want to throw my phone across the room, but then I wouldn’t know what happens next and Americans are nothing if not nosy.

Mara returns wearing a hoodie and holding a long extension cord like a whip. She drags her space heater from the bedroom and plugs it in, not to warm anything, but because the red power light near her hand looks like a small, obedient demon. She wraps the end of the cord around her wrist and mutters, “Insurance.”

She freezes. We freeze. The doorbell rings exactly one time.

The camera holds on the empty doorway. A red balloon drifts across and out of frame like the apartment is a train car someone forgot to shut. Chat is no longer words; it’s keysmash and emoji and CALL 911 and stop playing and girl this ain’t cute and I consider calling for her and realize how good it would sound to 911 if I said “Hi yes I’m watching a Live of a stranger being haunted by intellectual property.”

She opens the door anyway, like a woman who would rather get bit than back down. Hallway empty. Floor clean. A single candy wrapper crinkles because children have no sense of appropriate settings for evidence. She closes the door and sets the extra chain, eyes on the peephole like she can see out through the past.

“Killin’ Time ☠️🔥” – 9:21 PM

Freddy: Bro she got a heater cord LMAOO
Jason: 🔪🔥
Pennywise: This is my roman empire (balloons)
Pinhead: Even the faithful require heat in winter. How tender.
Freddy: I’m muting you for thirty days, I swear.
Michael: (photo: her peephole from outside. It’s… impossible.)
Freddy: …subtle.
Creeper: 👁️ (switches his Live to a static slide: COLLAB TONIGHT)



Mara sits on the couch and stares right at us. There is noise under the floor like a neighbor dropped a bowling ball or a demon found Jesus and started moving furniture. She ignores it. “If you report this Live,” she says, “may your ex come back with a ring and a Rolex he can’t afford.” She smirks. The app briefly loves her again.

We cut—hard, ugly—to her kitchen. It’s not actually a cut; her phone buckles like it got dragged. The feed reopens to show a close-up of the countertop and a single feather I know she didn’t place there. The comments go from words to NOOOOOO in about half a second. Mara’s hand enters the frame and flicks the feather into the trash with disdain that could baptize.

“Return to sender,” she says. She is five-three and exhausting; God bless her.

Then—because the internet loves escalation more than it loves safety—another “parody” account stitches her original I could take Jeepers and drops a perfect, clean shot of a rural road. It’s the same road from earlier, but closer. The camera isn’t moving this time; it’s waiting. A truck rolls by with a NO LEFT TURN sticker. The Creeper’s shadow slides over the lens and I feel the ancient animal back-brain in me say run, which is bold from a couch.

“Killin’ Time ☠️🔥” – 10:03 PM

Freddy: Okay but real talk… who’s actually going, or are we just gonna duet her until sunrise?
Jason: 🔪 (posts a Google Maps pin with a lake emoji)
Pennywise: I’m in the comments section rn making kids cry 😋
Pinhead: The ritual is complete when she realizes attention and terror share a face.
Freddy: Somebody get this man a therapist.
Michael: (reacts with a simple ✅)
Ghostface: Trailer’s almost cut. Need one final beat: a line from her that slaps.
Creeper: 👁️ (pins: she’ll say it)



She does. Of course she does. She looks at us, at me, at a million strangers, at the monsters glued to their own screens, and says, “If this is an invitation, my RSVP is no—but I’ll leave the porch light on.” Her smile is full teeth and schedule conflict.

She ends the Live.

We don’t sleep. We pace our living rooms; we check our locks. We tell ourselves it’s marketing and then we check again. Mara posts a normal video thirty minutes later—lip gloss, dewy highlight, a split second of normal laugh—and the first five comments are u good?, blink twice, drop location, queen we will riot, and something about eyebrows because the internet cannot resist being itself.

Midnight hits like a slow slap. Ghostface drops his trailer. It’s cut like a horror movie from a timeline that already happened. It slices between Mara’s pan and the Creeper’s wing, between Michael’s tilt and the red balloon’s lazy disrespect, between her smile and that split-screen sniff. It ends on three words: COLLAB COMPLETE and a hashtag: #SeeYouNextHalloween with a pumpkin.

“Killin’ Time ☠️🔥” – 12:01 AM

>Freddy: That trailer kinda go crazy.
Jason: 🔪👍
Pennywise: I’m in the comments dropping clown nose emojis 😈
Pinhead: Completion is an illusion, beloved. There is only return.
Freddy: WHO INVITED YOU TO PHILOSOPHY NIGHT
Michael: (typing… stops)
Creeper: 🩸👁️
System: NEW MEMBER ADDED → Chucky 👶🔪
Chucky: Yo y’all mind if I slide in her DMs next? I got a wife and a kid but I’m messy.



Morning is rude and bright. Mara posts a story sipping coffee from a mug that says NOT TODAY, SATAN, I’M BOOKED and the whole app takes a breath like we were underwater. She doesn’t hide. She refuses to be run off her own stage. Her comments are full of aunties and cousins and nieces and nephews she never met. #ProtectMara trends for three hours. Skeptics post thirty-minute breakdowns about how she faked it and get three million views because nothing is ever for free; the disbelief economy pay