Bentellect Scary Stitches / Benny Boy

About

Bentellect Scary Stitches or We're Coming For You Benny Boy refers to a trend on TikTok in which users Stitch videos of user @Bentellect reading memes and tweets, adding a random scary image to the end, often accompanied with a voiceover telling "Benjamin," aka Bentellect, that they are coming from him. The trend began in August 2021. Stitches are largely collected under the hashtags "#bennyboy" and "#bentellect."

Origin

TikToker Bentellect (@bentellect) is known for making videos in which he reads and reacts to various memes, often laughing throughout them (example shown below).

On August 8th, 2021, TikToker^[4] @amariwest.1 posted a Stitch to one of Bentellect's meme reading videos in which he reacts to a meme that shows a restaurant named "Pizza Hat," adding a scary image of a man in a rabbit mask standing on some stairs to the end, with a text-to-speech voiceover saying, "do you want to go to pizza hat Benny boy?" The video gained over 2.1 million views in three days and began the trend (shown below).

Spread

On August 10th, a number of accounts began Stitching Bentellect's meme reaction videos, adding a scary image to the end and usually a disturbing voiceover, contrasting the bright mood of the video. For example, on that day, TikToker^[1] @themasterbucks posted a Stitch to one of Bentellect's videos, adding an image of a creature by artist Trevor Henderson shrouded in darkness behind a house and a voiceover saying, "Ben. We're outside, Ben. We can smell you." The video gained over 2.8 million views in a day (shown below).

Over the course of the following days, more users began contributing to the trend, Stitching Bentellect's videos with further scary imagery and voiceovers in the same vein. Accounts specifically made to Stitch Bentellect's videos with this content also appeared with names like @benny.boy.we.are.here^[2] and @bewarebennyboy.^[3] The former's first upload gained over 1.5 million views in a day, while the latter's second upload gained the same in the same period of time (shown below, left and right respectively). The audio of the videos uses a deep-voice text-to-speech option available on the app.

Many of these videos became very popular within a day, with TikTokers commenting on them revealing how they'd been flooding their "For You" pages. On the same day, YouTube channel ThatTokPlug posted a compilation of the Stitches, gaining over 2,400 views in under a day (shown below).

On the same day, TikToker^[5] @xavware posted a video scrolling through his For You page, showing a number of the videos appearing in a row, gaining over 900,000 views in a day (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References