Take This Lollipop is a 2011 interactive horror short film and Facebook app. It uses the Facebook Connect application to bring viewers themselves into the film, through 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.
About Take This Lollipop in brief
Take This Lollipop is a 2011 interactive horror short film and Facebook app written and directed by Jason Zada. It uses the Facebook Connect application to bring viewers themselves into the film, through 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. The title comes from a parents’ warning to children to avoid taking candy from strangers. The project had no real marketing at all, until a few personal friends 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, it had been viewed 7 million times with 1 million “likes” The film was released on October 17, 2011, and by March 2012, the trailer had received nearly 13 million to 13 million likes on Facebook and Twitter.
According to Zada, the app was taken offline prior to August 2018. The film’s website now hosts a Facebook post by him, saying that the data needed had become ‘quite hard to access’ and had affected the functionality of the film. The concept developed from Zada’s attraction to horror films from his youth, his wish to do something serious within that genre, and his experience as a digital editor. He decided to create a project that would ‘get under people’s skin without any gore or anything’, and that would underscore its point by making it about the viewer in a quite personal manner. The filming environment was an abandoned and reputedly haunted hospital, that helped and Jason’s script and direction did the rest. Zada used similar techniques for his Elf Yourself project for OfficeMax which had been seen by 194 million people in its first six weeks.
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This page is based on the article Take This Lollipop published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
