Wednesday Dance

Origin: episode four, one take, no choreographer

Netflix released Wednesday on November 23, 2022. In the fourth episode, “Woe What a Night,” Wednesday Addams attends the Nevermore school dance and performs a routine that looks like nothing else on television: stiff-armed, twitchy, half marionette and half exorcism, entirely out of step with the music but completely in character.

The scene’s most repeated fact is that Jenna Ortega choreographed it herself. She has cited Siouxsie Sioux, Bob Fosse, 1980s footage of goth clubbers and other archival performance clips as her references, and she reportedly filmed the sequence while unwell — she tested positive for COVID-19 shortly afterwards, and the scene was not reshot.

On screen the dance is set to “Goo Goo Muck” by American psychobilly band The Cramps, a 1981 recording that most of the show’s audience had never heard.

The song swap that made it a meme

The trend did not use that song. On November 24, 2022 — one day after release — TikTok user @n0gitsxne.backup posted an edit of the scene set to a sped-up “Bloody Mary” by Lady Gaga, a 2011 album track from Born This Way. It took over 28 million views in five days, and the pairing became definitive: the sped-up Gaga vocal syncs uncannily with Ortega’s movements, better than the audio actually used in the episode.

Recreations followed within days, each pulling numbers usually reserved for major label campaigns:

• @clairementfrr, November 26 — over 4.7 million views in three days.
• @emilymeding, November 27 — over 14 million views in two days.
• @konni___, November 28 — over 19 million views in a single day.

Both songs saw a huge streaming surge as a result, and “Bloody Mary” was widely reported to have re-entered charts more than a decade after its release. Lady Gaga reportedly joined in with her own version of the dance.

Why it spread so fast

The routine is unusually learnable. It is a sequence of distinct, angular poses rather than a flowing eight-count, so it reads clearly on a phone screen and forgives imprecision — the jerkiness is the style. It also comes with a costume: a black dress, dark eye makeup, two braids. That gave the trend a built-in transformation element, the same engine that powers Wipe It Down and countless outfit-reveal formats.

And it arrived attached to a genuine hit. Wednesday set the record for the most hours viewed in a week for an English-language Netflix series, with 341 million hours in its first week, and became the platform’s second most-watched English-language series within three weeks. Every new viewer arrived already knowing the reference.

The 1966 echo

The bit has an ancestor. The original Addams Family series aired an episode on April 1, 1966 in which Lisa Loring, the first Wednesday, dances the Watusi and teaches it to Lurch — a clip that had circulated online for years, often set to modern music. Ortega’s version is a deliberate nod, and fans quickly cut the two together, sixty years of the same character dancing badly on purpose.

Legacy

The Wednesday dance was arguably the last mass-participation dance trend of the pre-AI-video era, and it remains the reference point for “goth girl dance” edits, Halloween costumes and cosplay content. Its most durable contribution may be commercial: it demonstrated that a sped-up back-catalogue track, chosen by a random editor rather than a label, can outperform a show’s own licensed soundtrack.