Is the Cat in the Hat Really the New Viral School Scare?
Apparently, a new viral trend has arrived just in time for the beginning of the school year — or, at least, we are being told that one has arrived. Across the country, local news reports have begun appearing about disturbing videos featuring the Cat in the Hat. Yes, the Dr. Seuss character.
In these videos, a much more sinister version of the Cat is being depicted outside or near schools, where threatening messages are being delivered and questions are being asked about who his “next victim” might be. The videos are reportedly being created with artificial intelligence, presumably by students or other social media users, and are then being shared online. And with that, a “viral trend” has been declared. But is it actually viral?
That may be the more interesting part of this story.
Similar reports are being aired by local television stations around the country, with remarkably similar warnings being given. As more coverage is produced, more parents and students are being introduced to something they may never have encountered otherwise.
It raises an interesting question: Is a viral trend being reported, or is a viral trend being created by the reporting of it?
We’ve been here before. The Momo Challenge was once treated as a major threat to children. Warnings were issued, school officials became involved, assemblies were held, and parents were terrified. Eventually, serious questions were raised about whether the supposed challenge had ever existed on anything close to the scale being suggested. Then there were the creepy clown sightings of 2016, when reports were repeated so frequently that additional sightings, pranks and copycats were inevitably encouraged.
Now, in 2026, something new has been added to the equation: AI.
A familiar children’s character can be transformed into something frightening in seconds. A particular school can be mentioned. A threatening scenario can be manufactured. The finished product can then be dropped onto social media and presented as though something much larger is happening.
Maybe the evil Cat in the Hat really is the newest fad sweeping through schools. But perhaps something else is being demonstrated.
A few videos can be created. Those videos can be noticed by local media. A “nationwide trend” can be announced. Millions of parents and students can then be told about it including countless kids who had never heard of it before. And by tomorrow, some of those kids may decide to make their own.
At that point, was the viral trend discovered by the media .. or was it helped into existence by the coverage?
The school year has barely begun, and already the Cat in the Hat has apparently been given his turn as the newest internet boogeyman.
Yet again, horror is going out of its way to surprise people in 2026, with another movie that seemingly no one expected to make much money suddenly having a legitimate chance at becoming a success. The movie is called Buddy.
And if you haven’t heard of Buddy, the premise alone should get your attention. Written and directed by Too Many Cooks creator Casper Kelly, the movie takes the relentlessly cheerful world of a 1990s children’s television program and turns it into a nightmare. At the center of the fictional show It’s Buddy! is Buddy, a giant bright-orange unicorn voiced by Keegan-Michael Key who sings songs, plays games and teaches children wholesome life lessons. Think Barney & Friends, Blue’s Clues and Pee-wee’s Playhouse thrown into a blender — and then turned into a horror movie. When one of the children refuses to participate in Buddy’s activities and subsequently disappears, the other kids begin to realize that their colorful television world isn’t quite what it seems, and neither is their supposedly lovable host. The film also stars Cristin Milioti, Topher Grace, Delaney Quinn, Michael Shannon and Patton Oswalt.
And apparently audiences were willing to take a chance on something this bizarre.
Buddy has emerged as the latest independent horror success story, grossing an estimated $5,363,827 from only 1,258 theaters during its opening weekend. That’s roughly double the early projections of $2.5 million to $3 million. The Roadside Attractions and Saban Films release now holds the biggest opening weekend of 2026 for a movie released on fewer than 1,800 screens. It’s also reportedly the second-biggest opening in Roadside Attractions’ history and the largest opening ever for Saban Films.
This week, as people continue to deal with the death of Tim Curry — legendary actor and, in many ways, a hero to misfits across the world — his movies and roles are naturally coming back into focus as people renew their love for everything he gave us.
Pennywise the Dancing Clown will obviously be near the top of that list.
Bill Skarsgård’s movie version is amazing in its own right, but Tim Curry created something in 1990 that simply stuck. That face. That voice. The humor mixed with menace. Curry’s Pennywise became an image burned into pop culture and helped establish the character for an entire generation.
But there’s another Tim Curry movie we’d like to celebrate right now, one that deserves just as much attention:
Clue.
Tim Curry’s performance as Wadsworth in Clue was, hands down, one of his greatest.
He was basically a real-life comic book character running around that mansion as this collection of wealthy, eccentric and increasingly suspicious people attempted to figure out who was murdering everyone around them.
And Curry never stopped moving.
Especially during that incredible final act, when Wadsworth practically reenacts the entire movie — racing from room to room, retracing everyone’s steps, changing voices, throwing himself around the mansion ..
He even a medical issue from it!
Tim Curry once described the toll this role took on him: “I actually had a sort of incident of high blood pressure towards the end, when all of the conclusions were happening, because I was running around like a mad person. They took me to the doctor and I had to take pills for a week, my blood pressure was so high. Which was very tiresome.”
Clue is one of those rare movies that remains fun across generations. Kids can watch it and laugh at the physical comedy. Adults pick up on an entirely different layer of jokes. People from completely different backgrounds and generations have discovered it, quoted it and watched it over and over again.
And I think a tremendous amount of that comes down to Tim Curry.
Go back and watch Clue sometime and mentally remove him from the movie.
Just imagine those same scenes with everyone else.
It’s still a good cast. It’s still a clever story. There are still funny performances.
But something is missing.
It doesn’t quite hit.
Tim Curry was the electricity running through that movie. There was something special about what he did with Wadsworth that elevated everyone around him and helped turn what could have been a forgotten 1980s comedy into a movie people are still watching and loving more than 40 years later.
The world lost a great actor, and for many people who grew up watching him, it almost feels like we lost an old friend.
So perhaps this weekend, or whenever you find a little spare time in life, go back and revisit some Tim Curry.
Sure, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and IT will understandably be near the top of the list.
But give Clue another watch.
And while you’re watching it, try to imagine that movie working without Tim Curry.
Spider-Man continues his dominance at the box office, a run that at this point has lasted almost the entire month of August.
And now, with summer winding down, the question becomes: How much longer can this Marvel hero continue to grab the No. 1 spot each weekend?
Because he did it again.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is heading toward an estimated $22 million for the weekend, giving the film its fifth consecutive weekend at No. 1 and pushing its domestic total to around $891 million. That puts $900 million within striking distance and continues to showcase Spider-Man as possibly the strongest movie story of the entire year.
Five weeks in, people are STILL going to see this movie.
Coyote vs. Acme finally arrived in theaters this weekend after its bizarre journey from being essentially shelved and nearly disappearing altogether to actually getting a theatrical release. And audiences apparently wanted to see it.
The live-action/animated family film is looking at roughly a $13–14 million opening weekend, putting it into a battle with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, now in its seventh weekend, for second place.
And perhaps even more interesting: people seem to really like Coyote vs. Acme.
The movie currently sits at 95% with critics and 94% with verified audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, which could give this one some legs beyond opening weekend. For a movie that at one point looked like it might never even be released, that’s a pretty remarkable turnaround.
But once again, the weekend belongs to Spider-Man.
Five weekends.
Five victories.
Nearly $900 million domestically.
Summer is almost over, but apparently Spider-Man isn’t ready to give up the box office just yet.
Twenty-five years ago, Jeepers Creepers arrived in theaters and looking back at the movie now means looking at two very different stories at the same time.
There is the story of Jeepers Creepers itself: a wonderfully strange, genuinely frightening monster movie that arrived at exactly the right moment for horror.
And then there is the story of Victor Salva.
Jeepers Creepers opened on August 31, 2001, just days before September 11 would change virtually everything about American life and culture. Horror itself was also at an interesting crossroads. The Scream era had revitalized the slasher movie during the 1990s, but by 2001 the self-aware slasher formula was beginning to run its course. The remake explosion of the 2000s hadn’t really started yet. Neither had the much more brutal wave of horror that would characterize part of the decade.
And then this new monster movie showed up.
A brother and sister are driving home from college through the middle of nowhere. An enormous, rusted truck suddenly appears behind them. They encounter a strange man apparently dumping bodies down a pipe beside an abandoned church.
And for quite a while, nobody watching the movie knows what the hell they’re looking at.
That’s one of the things that made Jeepers Creepers work so well.
At first it could almost be a serial-killer movie. Then it becomes something else entirely. The Creeper isn’t a man. He isn’t Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. He isn’t another wisecracking 1990s slasher villain.
He’s a monster. Pure and simple..
The mythology slowly reveals itself: every 23rd spring, for 23 days, this ancient creature emerges to feed on human beings, consuming parts of their bodies that it can then use to regenerate its own.
Made for roughly $10 million, Jeepers Creepers opened at number one at the American box office. It made approximately $13 million during the three-day weekend and nearly $16 million over the four-day Labor Day period, setting a Labor Day opening record at the time. Worldwide, it ultimately grossed around $59 million.
The movie actually became the HORROR REPORT’S 2001 movie of the year and proved from this screenshot:
Two years later, Jeepers Creepers 2 actually broke the Labor Day record established by the original.
A franchise had been born.
But there was another story behind Jeepers Creepers, and it had begun long before anyone saw that truck barreling down the highway.
Victor Salva had already been convicted of sexually abusing a child.
In 1988, Salva pleaded guilty to charges stemming from his sexual abuse of Nathan Forrest Winters, the 12-year-old star of Salva’s 1989 movie Clownhouse. Salva had also videotaped one of the encounters. He was sentenced to three years in prison and served approximately 15 months.
That distinction needs to be made clearly when discussing this history today: these aren’t allegations that surfaced years after Jeepers Creepers. Salva was convicted.
And yet he returned to filmmaking.
Francis Ford Coppola, who had helped finance Clownhouse, continued to support Salva’s career. Salva eventually directed Powder for Disney, released in 1995.
That movie generated controversy when Winters publicly protested its release and questioned why Hollywood was providing another major filmmaking opportunity to the man who had abused him.
But Salva continued working.
And eventually he made Jeepers Creepers.
There is something worth remembering about 2001, though, particularly for those of us who actually lived through this period rather than discovering these movies decades later through the internet.
Information didn’t travel the way it does now.
There was no Twitter. No Facebook. No TikTok. Google itself was only a few years old. You didn’t necessarily watch a movie trailer, immediately search the director’s entire history and then spend the next hour reading thousands of people arguing about whether you should see the movie.
For a tremendous portion of the audience walking into Jeepers Creepers, Victor Salva was simply a name appearing during the credits.
I remember even reporting on my own website years later about Jeepers Creepers potentially becoming Victor Salva’s salvation and wondering aloud how much his past should be part of the story. Had punishment occurred? Was forgiveness possible? Was there a point at which somebody was permitted to work again?
Those were uncomfortable questions then and they remain uncomfortable questions now.
But history also demonstrates that society goes through cycles of judgment, forgiveness, reconsideration and sometimes judgment again.
What happened in 2001 wasn’t necessarily widespread acceptance or forgiveness of Victor Salva. For many people, it was simply a lack of widespread knowledge. As the internet matured and information became easier to find, that changed.
People researched Salva. His conviction became increasingly associated with the franchise he had created. And inevitably, audiences began looking backward at the movies themselves through an entirely different lens.
Things that might once have seemed merely strange began receiving considerably more scrutiny.
There is the scene involving a man urinating in the original. There is the second movie and its prolonged focus on a high-school athletic team composed largely of young, muscular male characters. And eventually there would be Jeepers Creepers 3, containing a subplot involving a teenage girl and inappropriate sexual attention from her stepfather.
It would be irresponsible to declare that every one of those creative decisions reveals something about Salva’s intentions. We cannot know that.
But it is equally impossible to pretend audiences haven’t reexamined those scenes differently after learning what the filmmaker had done.
And by the time Jeepers Creepers 3 was being made, everything had changed.
Then the casting process created another controversy.
A casting notice sought an 18-year-old actress to portray a 13-year-old girl whose backstory involved inappropriate sexual advances from her stepfather. Breakdown Services ultimately removed the casting notice and project from its system.
Suddenly the story surrounding Jeepers Creepers 3 wasn’t simply that the Creeper was coming back.
Victor Salva’s past was coming back with him.
And when the movie was screened in 2017, the controversy became even worse.
Reviewers reported that one version contained dialogue appearing to rationalize the stepfather’s sexual attraction to the teenage character. That dialogue was reportedly removed from the theatrical version, but the damage was already being done.
There were boycott efforts. A planned Los Angeles screening was canceled amid controversy and threatened protests. Entertainment publications that might once have simply written about another Jeepers Creepers sequel were instead explaining to an entirely new generation what Salva had done.
And then came an extraordinary piece of historical timing.
Jeepers Creepers 3 received its theatrical event release on September 26, 2017.
On October 5 — only nine days later — The New York Times published its investigation into Harvey Weinstein.
The #MeToo reckoning exploded across Hollywood.
Suddenly an industry that had spent decades wrestling, sometimes very poorly, with questions about separating artists from their behavior was being forced into a completely different conversation about power, abuse, accountability and who continued receiving opportunities despite their conduct.
Salva’s conviction was nearly three decades old by then. But the cultural judgment surrounding it was new.
And after Jeepers Creepers 3, Victor Salva essentially disappeared from mainstream filmmaking.
There has been no subsequent Salva-directed feature film released. When the franchise returned in 2022 with Jeepers Creepers: Reborn, Salva wasn’t the director. The monster he created continued without him.
Which brings this story back to the summer of 2001.
Because despite everything that subsequently happened to the reputation of its creator, something strange has happened to Jeepers Creepers itself.
The movie survived.
And personally, I understand why.
I remember going to see Jeepers Creepers with friends on a fateful summer night when it came out. I remember driving those long, winding roads to the theater and then driving those same dark roads back home afterward. Before a stop at Perkins when we met a girl who was pretty and nice, and joining the military.. we never saw her again and 9/11 happened just days later. I wonder to this day if she also remembers that strange chance encounter herself…
If you’ve ever lived somewhere surrounded by mountains, woods and roads that become completely black at night, you’ll understand why Jeepers Creepers was probably the perfect movie to watch before that drive home.
Jeepers Creepers reinvigorated the enjoyment of horror.
It wasn’t another slasher. It wasn’t simply trying to outdo the last movie with more blood. Somebody had created an actual monster with its own mythology, its own rules, its own appearance and an instantly recognizable presence.
After the Scream-dominated era of the 1990s, that felt incredibly refreshing.
Twenty-five years later, Jeepers Creepers has staying power.
There remains this strange exception audiences seem willing to make for the movie itself even when they aren’t willing to make that exception for Victor Salva.
Perhaps that’s because movies ultimately become bigger than the people who make them. Hundreds of people participate in creating a film. Actors give performances. Crews build sets. Musicians create scores. Audiences attach their own memories to what they see.
And eventually a movie becomes part of somebody else’s life.
That doesn’t erase what Victor Salva did.
Nathan Forrest Winters was a child when he was abused, and any retrospective about Salva’s career that treats his conviction as merely an inconvenient footnote would be doing a tremendous disservice to the person who actually suffered because of his actions.
But acknowledging that history doesn’t require pretending Jeepers Creepers wasn’t important.
Both things can be true.
Victor Salva committed terrible crimes against a child, was convicted, served prison time, returned to filmmaking, found enormous success with Jeepers Creepers, and eventually watched public attitudes toward his past change dramatically as a new generation learned what had happened.
…that’s the complicated legacy we’re left with 25 years later.
A movie that arrived during the final days of one version of America, just before September 11, at a transitional moment for horror itself. A monster that seemingly came out of nowhere and became an icon. A filmmaker whose disturbing history gradually became inseparable from discussions about his creation.
And memories of driving home on dark summer roads after seeing something genuinely new.
Every 23rd spring, for 23 days, the Creeper gets to eat.
Twenty-five years later, people are still talking about him.
They’re just talking a lot more about the man who created him, too.
Some very sad news is coming from the Ground Zero family.
Rumors of the passing of longtime Ground Zero with Clyde Lewis Executive Producer Ron Patton began circulating across social media today. Sadly, Ground Zero has now officially confirmed that Patton passed away peacefully following a short battle with cancer.
For those of us who have listened to Ground Zero over the years, Ron Patton may have primarily been known as the man behind the scenes alongside Clyde Lewis. But his career and his importance to independent media went much further.
Patton spent more than three decades working in independent media as a publisher, writer, researcher, editor and producer. Among his many projects, he published Endure to the End, created MKzine, produced ConspiraZine Radio, and became publisher of Paranoia Magazine.
But perhaps his most notable and lasting role was as Executive Producer of Ground Zero with Clyde Lewis.
And according to Ground Zero’s remembrance of him, Ron wasn’t simply Clyde’s producer or colleague.
He was also Clyde Lewis’s best friend.
Their friendship became intertwined with the history of Ground Zero itself. There were times when the program’s future was uncertain and walking away might have been the easier option. Ron was apparently one of the people who refused to let that happen. He continued developing ideas, searching for ways to keep the program alive and, perhaps most importantly, continued believing in Clyde and what Ground Zero meant to its listeners.
Many listeners probably never realized just how much of the program they heard night after night had Ron Patton’s fingerprints on it.
The news is especially heartbreaking considering everything the Ground Zero family has already been enduring. Clyde Lewis has been dealing with his own serious health struggles and continues attempting to recover. Now, in the midst of that battle, he has lost not only his longtime Executive Producer but one of his closest friends.
Ron had also been fighting his own serious health problems. For months, supporters rallied around him and his family, including through a GoFundMe established to help with his medical expenses. More recently, his family announced that he had entered hospice care.
There are people behind every long-running radio program whose voices we may rarely hear and whose faces we may not immediately recognize, but without them the program simply wouldn’t be what it is.
Our thoughts are with Ron Patton’s family, Clyde Lewis, the entire Ground Zero team and everyone who knew and loved him.
May Ron Patton rest in peace, and may his family and friends find comfort in knowing that the work he spent decades creating will continue to be heard and remembered.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is on the verge of knocking Titanic out of the all-time global box-office top five!!
Over the weekend, Brand New Day racked up another $39 million domestically (and $109 million globally) bringing its totals to $854.9 million domestic ($2.22 billion globally).
That puts Brand New Day just $44 million shy of overtaking James Cameron’s Oscar-winning 1997 hit, something Brand New Day should easily manage in a week or so..
A lot of newscasters and social media content creators over the past day have been showcasing the horrific imagery of the flooding at the Nepal-China border crossing.
And the videos are almost unbelievable to watch. But what makes them even more horrific is remembering that this isn’t a movie set. Those aren’t Legos or props bouncing around in the water. Those are real people who, in the midst of their lives, were suddenly caught in a catastrophic rush of water — apparently triggered by some kind of seismic or geological event, whether an earthquake, landslide, or something else. When you actually stop and consider what you’re watching, the videos are heartbreaking.
But that’s the problem. We don’t really stop anymore.
We watch it. We scroll. We watch it again from another angle. Someone reposts it. Someone adds music or commentary. It appears on another feed, and then another. And because we’ve become so desensitized to violence, disaster and heartbreak, something absolutely horrifying somehow becomes just another piece of content in the daily news cycle.
But these aren’t just dramatic images. These are images of people losing their lives in one of the most terrifying ways imaginable. People who had families. People who woke up that morning expecting there to be a tomorrow. And now the final moments of some of their lives are being replayed endlessly for millions of strangers.
And people just keep reposting it. It’s incredibly morbid when you really stop and think about it.
Actor Tim Curry, who starred in numerous cult-classic films, has died, according to media outlets. He was 80.
The legendary actor is known for his role as the enigmatic Dr. Frank-N-Furter in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and as the terrifying clown Pennywise in the 1990 miniseries of Stephen King’s “It.”
It was Dolly Parton yesterday and Tim Curry today. Both 80
So what does that mean, did everyone actually want to see He-Man but just decided to wait until they could watch it at home as part of their Prime subscription? Or is the fandom that went to see it in theaters multiple times now just leaving it stream all day long on repeat? (this one sounds possible).. Either way, the numbers are pretty remarkable.
According to Nielsen’s U.S. streaming rankings, Masters of the Universe pulled in 1.173 BILLION minutes viewed during the week of July 20–26, putting it ahead of every movie and television series on the overall streaming chart.
HE-MAN!
The movie didn’t arrive on Prime Video until July 22, meaning it accumulated those numbers with only about five days of availability during Nielsen’s measured week.
That’s one heck of a turnaround for a movie that spent much of June being labeled a theatrical bomb that the world just scoffed at like Skeletor making a sarcastic comment to Mer-Man..
The movie finished its domestic theatrical run at roughly $65 million, and the worldwide numbers weren’t enough to make its reported production budget look particularly pretty. For weeks, the conversation surrounding Masters of the Universe wasn’t about whether there would be another movie … it was whether Hollywood had once again tried to resurrect an ’80s franchise that simply didn’t have enough life left in it.
Maybe that conversation was premature. Because now people are watching He-Man. A LOT. And this isn’t just one strange Nielsen week, either. Amazon’s own worldwide Prime Video rankings still had Masters of the Universe as its #1 original movie for August 10–16.
That suddenly makes the future of this franchise a lot more interesting.
No sequel has officially been announced, and obviously streaming success doesn’t automatically erase what happened at the box office. But Amazon MGM happens to own the movie, and Amazon also happens to own the streaming service where He-Man is suddenly doing enormous numbers.
So maybe the question isn’t whether Masters of the Universe deserves another $170 million theatrical gamble. Maybe the question becomes whether Masters of the Universe 2 belongs on Prime Video.
Because if there’s one thing we’ve learned this summer, apparently people really did want to see He-Man. They just might not have wanted to leave the house to do it.
