Editor's Note: This entry contains spoilers for the 2021 thriller film Old; read at your own caution.

About

The Beach That Makes You Old refers to a series of memes referencing the phenomenon of a beach that ages people from M. Night Shyamalan's 2021 thriller film Old. Following the premiere of the film in late July 2021, jokes about the beach gained viral spread on social media.

Origin

On July 23rd, 2021, the thriller film Old, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, premiered.^[1] The film follows a group of tourists that get trapped on a beach that rapidly ages them, with the tourists aging two years in one hour spent on the beach (trailer shown below). The film is loosely based on the French-Swiss graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters.

On July 19th, 2021, Twitter^[2] user @JEBermanator posted the earliest found joke about the film, with the tweet gaining over 80 retweets and 510 likes in one week (shown below, top left). On July 23rd, 2021, Twitter^[3][4] user @zachsilberberg posted the two first viral memes about the beach, referring to it as "the beach that makes you old." The tweets gained over 710 retweets and 9,900 likes and 4,500 retweets and 70,500 likes in four days, respectively (shown below, top right and bottom).

Spread

Starting on July 23rd, memes about the beach gained viral spread on Twitter. For example, on July 24th, 2021, Twitter^[5] user @sablaah posted a meme that gained over 1,800 retweets and 30,000 likes in three days (shown below, left). On the same day, Twitter^[6] user @ralter posted an "All-Star" meme that gained over 2,600 retweets and 35,700 likes in the same period (shown below, right).

The meme maintained viral popularity until approximately July 26th. Several news outlets reported on the spread of the memes, including articles by Daily Dot^[7] and Junkee.^[8]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References