About

Aunt May Praying is a memorable scene from the 2002 Sam Raimi Spider-Man film in which Aunt May (portrayed by Rosemary Harris) is kneeling and praying beside her bed as the villain Green Goblin suddenly appears by bursting through the walls to attack her. Over the 2010s and 2020s, the moment became a prevalent exploitable video and image macro meme format paired with ironic phrases or humorous captions across Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Origin

One of the earliest found posts of the "Aunt May Praying" scene was posted on YouTube^[1] by user @jeffcollen5900 on June 1st, 2012. In the scene, The villain Green Goblin (played by Willem Dafoe) explodes the wall to her apartment, entering through the hole and demands that Aunt May finish her prayer as she was just about to say the "deliver us from evil" line. The scene (shown below) garnered roughly 134,000 views and 907 likes in 11 years.

One of the earliest known online parodies of that scene was posted as a GIF by an anonymous Make A GIF^[2] user on October 19th, 2015 (shown below).

Spread

The explosion scene became a prominent exploitable meme format on the internet over the following years, typically being used to describe unexpected situations. For example, on November 21st, 2018, Redditor^[3] u/vsimon115 posted a still image of the scene paired with overlay text, "When you pray so hard that the angels descend from heaven." The post (shown below, left) received roughly 18 upvotes in five years.

On April 10th, 2023, Facebook^[4] user @SomosComicsLat uploaded the same image paired with the overlay text in Spanish "Me on July 21st at the movies watching Barbie while Oppenheimer is being screened in the next room." The post (shown below, right) amassed over 29,000 likes and 8,000 shares in four months.

Various Examples

External References