Take This Lollipop

Take This Lollipop (2011)

Using information gleaned from a viewer's Facebook page, this interactive film personalizes the film for that particular viewer.

Date of release
2011-10-14
TMDB
6.3 / 10 (6)
Runtime
3m
Genres
Horror
Director
Jason Zada

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: California

Take This Lollipop is a 2011 interactive horror short film and Facebook app written and directed by Jason Zada. Developer Jason Nickel used Facebook Connect to bring viewers themselves into the film, through the use of pictures and messages from their own Facebook profiles. Starring actor Bill Oberst Jr. as 'The Facebook Stalker', the film acts to personalize and underscore the dangers inherent in posting too much personal information about oneself on the internet. The information gathered from a viewer's Facebook profile by the film's app is used once and then deleted.

Production

The title comes from a parents' warning to children to avoid taking candy from strangers.

The concept developed from director Jason Zada's attraction to horror films from his youth, his wish to do something serious within that genre, his experience as a digital editor, and his understanding that people place their personal information on the internet for anyone to find.

An earlier viral video by Zada was the Elf Yourself project for OfficeMax which had been seen by 194 million people in its first six weeks. Being a fan of "exploring human interaction with media", Zada used similar techniques for Take This Lollipop, but tapped into what he sees as the "larger collective fear we have now" toward personal information being on the internet.

The project had no real marketing at all, beyond its YouTube trailer and then an initial release on October 17, 2011, to a few personal friends, who then wrote about it on Twitter. Within 24 hours of release, the film had been watched approximately 400,000 times and had over 30,000 "likes" on Facebook. A week later, the film had been viewed 7 million times with 1.1 million "likes".

The trailer for this film was posted to YouTube on October 14, 2011, and the film and website themselves went live one week later, on October 17, 2011. The site was blocked temporarily by Facebook as a malicious app, but after Zada clarified that no Facebook information was being misused or shared, the site was unblocked.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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