It started with a black screen.
No music, no logos, no whiff of copyright or studio authority—just a negative void, the absence of everything but anticipation. In bedrooms, dorm lounges, trailer park TVs, and the seven-thousand-watt preview screens of multiplex lobbies, the void stretched, hungry and eternal.
At second three, the laughter began.
Not the cackling, punchline-drenched hysteria everyone expected. It started low—a hush, a wheeze, almost the gasp of a man caught between cough and confession.
Barely audible on laptop speakers, it forced listeners to lean in, volume dials nudged higher by the second. On phones, the sound vibrated in the skull, thin as a wire and twice as dangerous.
Then, a shift—first a pulse, then a tremor, then a giggle that flickered at the edge of the hearing. It slithered, undulated, as if there were something inside the laugh trying to wriggle out.
By second fifteen, it had begun to escalate. The sound was wet, suffused with a pleasure that sounded like the bone-deep ache after a nightmare. No scream, no cackle—just the sustained, perverse delight of someone who had found a way to make the world hurt.
For thirty seconds, that was all. Just the black, and the laugh, and the knowledge that it would not stop.
In a cineplex in Glendale, the screen flickered—teenagers clustered in hoodies and cheap cologne, expecting a Marvel trailer, got this instead. The laughter bored into their bones; one kid tried to laugh along, but the impulse died in his throat.
A girl near the aisle squeezed her boyfriend's arm so tight he winced, but she never took her eyes off the screen.
At the thirty-second mark, a match ignited.
The flare was so sudden it left burn afterimages on every retina. In the two frames before the flame found its focus, a shape emerged: the silhouette of a man, alone in the dark, eyes wide and reflective as a wolf at midnight.
The match steadied, then moved in a slow, surgical arc toward the camera. The hand was gloved—purple, velvet, impossibly clean. In the light, the face was revealed: white skin, not painted but saturated, pores invisible beneath the ceramic mask.
The eyes—inhuman, iridescent, something that remembered green but had evolved past it—locked on the lens and did not blink.
The lips, crimson and perfect, curled in a smile that seemed designed by something that had only ever read about human faces. For a moment, the laugh stopped, replaced by a silence that hissed louder than the sound ever had.
Then, the voice, soft as a razor sliding through silk:
"You want to hear a secret?"
The lips parted. The tongue—pale, wet—traced the curve of the upper lip, savoring the taste of the words before letting them fall.
The smile widened, stretching past the comfort of anatomy, paint splitting at the corners, eyes never leaving the audience.
The match guttered, flame lapping at the glove, but the hand did not move.
Then, darkness. Abrupt, total.
The clip ended mid-breath, no fade out, no closing credit. Just silence and the echo of the laugh, still ricocheting in the skulls of anyone who'd watched.
In the Glendale theater, not a soul moved for a full ten seconds. The girl let go of her boyfriend's arm, then hugged herself.
No one dared to laugh. Even the projectionist, two floors above, stared at the screen, hands frozen on the reel switch.
In apartments and dorms, in threadbare office cubicles and Uber back seats, viewers waited, holding the silence as if the next sound might be worse.
Someone at Warner Bros. marketing had planned for this. Or maybe not. Maybe it was the work of a night shift tech, a click at the wrong hour, a piece of code that broke free from its embargo and bled into the world.
Either way, it was too late to take it back.
Within thirty minutes, the world had seen it. And for thirty seconds, everyone who watched was certain: the Joker was real, and he was looking straight at them.
.....
The clip struck like a meteor, shattering the social net. In the first hour, five hundred tweets; by the second, five million.
#NewJoker trended globally, overshadowing wars and political scandals in minutes.
In a Sheffield student flat, six friends huddled around a laptop, watching the teaser on repeat. After one of them vomited into a Red Bull bottle, laughter erupted. Reaction videos flooded YouTube, faces captivated by the Joker's haunting eyes.
CinemaCracked's top reaction featured a woman with electric blue hair: "Guys. I watched it on mute. I still feel sick. Tell me this is a meme—"
Twitter continued scrolling:
@h0lyGhost: "I am not okay."
@filmgrl98: "Did they recast or find the real Joker?"
@food4fears: "Not going to sleep after that. Cat video recs???"
#NewJoker, #JokerSmile, #WhoIsThatJoker fought for supremacy.
YouTube counter surged: 27K, 101K, 2.1M, then 14 million as the West Coast awoke.
On TikTok, users filmed themselves watching in total darkness, the Joker's eyes their only light source. The eerie laugh layered over heartbeat tracks unsettled viewers.
Peoria school nurses dealt with kids too scared to leave bathrooms; in Seoul, film students took shots while playing the teaser on loop.
Critics pounced:
The New Yorker's blog: "This Joker goes where Ledger and Nicholson dared not—a pure horror."
Variety: "What is this thing? It's the most talked-about trailer online."
A Reddit thread on r/truefilm quickly gained attention: "Is it just me, or did anyone else notice the smile at the end wasn't CGI? It looked... alive."
Speculation ensued: digital puppetry, deepfake, experimental brainwave TV. The consensus: No human could make that sound.
The Joker's face turned into memes featuring presidents, cats, and Friends cast members. Yet, the stare retained its power; some users reported screen glitches freezing the image for hours.
Emergency rooms saw increased anxiety attacks and fainting incidents. A viral video showed a girl crying uncontrollably as she watched on her phone. With nine million views, she was revealed to be a famous network anchor's daughter, adding to the legend.
The burning question in WhatsApp groups, Discord servers, and comment threads:
"Who is this guy?"
The unknown fueled people's unease. And everyone knew an answer was coming—whether they were prepared or not.
...
The thirteenth floor of Warner Bros. PR buzzed with crisis and caffeine. Inside the glass conference room, executives crowded around the table, armed with laptops, phones, and assistants.
The VP of Digital Strategy glared at his phone.
"Who greenlit this drop? There's no press release—just forty million people getting jokered in their sleep!"
A junior assistant chimed in.
"Sir, the official Twitter account hasn't posted the link. It's not on the homepage either."
"Then how is it everywhere?"
Phones exploded into a cacophony as three plasma screens displayed live social dashboards: Twitter trends, YouTube view counts, and a distressing heatmap of global engagement.
A man at the end of the table attempted to take control.
"First priority—containment. Legal, how fast can we start DMCA strikes on re-uploads?"
The head of legal responded sharply:
"We've flagged 200,000 links already. They're mirroring it faster than we can keep up."
Interns at a wall of iMacs watched view counts skyrocket. The CMO surveyed the room.
"Is it positive or negative? What's the sentiment?"
"It's wild," the social lead replied.
"Comments range from terror to worship. We're seeing unprecedented reach."
The CMO grinned fiercely.
"So it's viral. We control the narrative. Draft an official statement."
The Digital VP, still fuming:
"But we didn't plan this."
"Nobody needs to know that!" the CMO shouted.
"God, this is Marketing 101!"
An intern, Tyler again, voice squeaking:
"Sir? Um, it's over a hundred million now. The Reddit thread is at seventy thousand comments. There are... uh... rumors about the actor. Some are saying he's a new AI, or, like, a medical experiment?"
The table absorbed this in silence. For one blessed second, even the phones went quiet.
In the adjacent office, separated from the madness by a single pane of soundproof glass, sat the Head of Global Publicity. She was a legend in the industry: blunt bob, high-collared black blouse, the gaze of a woman who had murdered lesser campaigns for breakfast.
She watched the clip on loop, each repetition burning deeper into her retinas. The only light in the office was the blue glow of the screen.
She dialed, one hand steady on the mouse.
"Get me Marcus Vale," she said, when the call connected.
On the other end, a voice asked, "What do you want me to say?"
The Head of Publicity never blinked.
"Say nothing," she replied.
"Whatever this is, we lean in. The myth is bigger than the man."
She hung up, eyes never leaving the frame.
In the war room, the CMO was pacing with manic energy:
"We run a banner campaign—'THE SMILE THAT WATCHED BACK.' Hashtag it everywhere. No name, no backstory, just the stare. It's all about the eyes."
The head of legal was still on her laptop, typing with a violence that would blister normal skin.
"You can meme it all you want, but if we don't control the narrative by noon, we'll have conspiracy freaks crawling through our bathrooms and hacking our coffee makers."
Someone on the PR line, a holdover from the last campaign, piped in:
"I think that's already happening. Three news outlets are running exposes about the production, saying there's something wrong with the lead. One outlet claims he's 'possessed.'"
The CMO snorted.
"Good. Let them. No such thing as bad press."
Tyler, voice dead:
"A hundred and fifty million."
The Digital VP, after a beat:
"Should we... maybe say something about the actor? He doesn't even have a Wikipedia page."
The CMO didn't hesitate.
"Mystery is currency. Let the world wonder. We'll say he's 'a new talent, discovered in the wild.'"
The interns looked at each other, the moment almost sacred. Tyler whispered,
"This is going to be my whole life for, like, a year."
......
The heatmap on the wall was now nothing but color, the entire globe ringing with notifications.
Back in her corner office, the Head of Publicity closed the tab, then reached for her second phone. She scrolled through two hundred notifications and selected the only one that mattered.
"Yes," she whispered. "This is working."
The rest of the building never heard her laugh.
The PR dashboard pulsed with rapidly updating numbers and graphs. Olivia's gaze remained fixed on the main screen, her hands tense on her coffee cup and mouse.
The view counter for the video thumbnail at the top of the screen spun up exponentially every thirty seconds.
Clicking to verify, she watched the silent Joker teaser. The unsettling laugh began at second three, creeping rather than striking hard. The match flared, revealing the Joker's unnerving face and green eyes. Staring and unblinking, he whispered a soft question:
"You want to hear a secret?"
As the camera closed in, his smile tightened hungrily, and his tongue traced his upper lip slowly. The video ended abruptly with an echoing laugh that left Olivia unsettled.
She examined the sequence again more closely, reviewing user reactions displayed on the analytics dashboard:
—"I felt it in my spine."
—"Who IS this guy???"
—"That's not acting. That's not even human."
—"He's looking at me, right? Someone else sees that?"
Olivia dragged the world map into the center of her screen, where the eastern seaboard buzzed with activity. Europe was coming online, the UK and Germany lighting up in an instant. She ran the clock forward—an hour showed fourteen million unique views.
Her phone vibrated with Slack notifications:
#wb-social-monitor: "#NewJoker trending #1 in 11 countries"
#crisis-room: "Who greenlit? WHERE IS THE PRESS RELEASE?"
#talent-outreach: "Press about to riot. Need talking points."
Emails flooded Olivia's inbox from all levels, including senior VP of communications:
—"Can you get ahead of this?"
—"We have reporters camped in the parking garage."
—"Is he even an actor? Or did we get deepfaked?"
—"Find me an angle. Fast."
She checked the video again, watching the voice rasp and soften, switching from threat to seduction. The eyes that found and looked past the camera.
The video went viral in bedrooms, offices, and subway cars alike. On a second monitor, Olivia scrolled through memes: #JokerSmile, #MarcusValeIsReal. Beneath them, she sensed fear.
She messaged an analyst in Tokyo:
"Are you seeing the same uptick? What's the flavor?"
The reply came instantly:
"They're obsessed. But they're scared. Like, actually scared."
Olivia leaned back in her chair, alone in the war room. The windows were black mirrors, the dashboard's glow displaying 17.4 million.
She scrolled through the #NewJoker thread on X, witnessing a mix of dread and awe:
@crimson_catlady: "Did we all just get MK ULTRA'd? I haven't blinked since it ended."
@mentalnotecase: "The voice. The smile. I'm not joking, I had to shut my laptop."
Even influencers seemed shaken. A popular film reaction channel posted a split-screen video showcasing the host's face as the Joker's smile widened. Olivia watched as his bravado crumbled.
She observed the Joker's body language: the tilt of his head, the way he held the match just a breath too long. It felt less like acting and more like remembering.
Her Slack alerted her:
#exec-corridor: "CMO wants a briefing. Five minutes. Can you summarize the threat?"
#urgent: "Press wants a quote. We need to calm people down."
With amusement, she thought about how they wanted to calm people after giving them a nightmare.
Checking real-time user engagement, she noticed unusual retention - nobody was bailing out mid-video.
Closing her eyes for a moment, she heard the Joker's words in her mind: "You want to hear a secret?"
She quickly typed her summary for the CMO:
—Unprecedented viral spread. No sign of user fatigue.
—Sentiment: fear excitement. Some reports of emotional distress.
—Identity of talent fueling obsession. Recommend maintaining ambiguity.
—Users believe the Joker is real, or at least, that he could be.
After sending her message, Olivia watched as the numbers continued to rise – fourteen million, sixteen million, nineteen million. She tried to recall any other phenomenon going this viral but couldn't remember one.
An anonymous comment on the screen drew her attention:
"I think he's still watching us."
Olivia's gaze shifted to the reflection in her monitor–the Joker's face, his eyes locked on hers and an unchanging smile.
She closed her laptop abruptly. Silence filled the room.
The numbers would continue climbing, regardless of her presence.
Pouring a fresh coffee, her hands trembled slightly.
As dawn broke, the world stirred and the Joker seemed omnipresent.
# Scene 2
By late afternoon, Olivia found herself on TikTok, trying to gauge the extent of the contagion. The app overflowed with Joker-inspired content: reactions, makeup transformations, sound remixes, and even videos of people watching the original clip, spawning an endless cycle of response videos.
Olivia scrolled through her feed. The first video was a split-screen reaction to the original Joker footage.
A teenage girl's face transformed as she watched the video—pupils dilating, jaw tensing, shoulders hunching in anticipation. At the "secret" line, she gasped involuntarily before covering her mouth with a hand, eyes filling with tearful disbelief.
The caption read: "Why am I literally shaking."
The next video showcased a makeup artist recreating the Joker's look while his laugh played hauntingly in the background. Each brush stroke was executed with precision despite her trembling hands. By the end, the replication bore uncanny resemblance to the source material, complete with every imperfection and smudge.
Even after countless viewings of the original footage, Olivia couldn't help but feel unnerved by these videos—as if the Joker's makeup wasn't just a mask but something contagious that sought to spread further.
Olivia scrolled through videos of people in Joker makeup, ASMR memes, and deadpan expressions with the laugh looping in the background. The trend had shifted from the Joker to people's reactions.
Then she found @PsychinPublic, where a psychology student dissected why the Joker was unsettling.
"First, the laugh creates a parasocial deficit. Second, he doesn't blink; no blinks equal predator. Third, his predatory body language signals: I see you, I want you, I might hurt you."
The video concluded:
"It's weaponized charisma. Marcus Vale is either a genius or a sociopath. Or both."
Comments and hashtags like #JokerBreakdown and #WhoIsMarcusVale flooded in.
With the search tag accumulating nearly a hundred million hits, Olivia switched to the trending tab, where above all else stood the question: Who is Marcus Vale?
Tomorrow, the world would wake up, and the Joker would be waiting.
No more secrets, just the smile.
......
She switched to YouTube's trending page. All ten top spots focused on one theme: Joker reactions, breakdowns, memes, and edits. The rest of the world seemed to vanish in the presence of this face, this voice.
At 8:42 PM Pacific, filmtheory.exe released a video—"POSSESSED: The Truth About Marcus Vale's Joker." It was a detailed examination of the phenomenon.
The boyish host stood before a green screen. "This Joker isn't just a character—it's a phenomenon. But what's really going on?"
He compared Marcus Vale's performance to past Jokers and pointed out each unique mannerism.
"The smile never drops, not even between laughs. And he doesn't blink once for thirty seconds straight."
He zoomed in on the torn corners of the lips.
"That's real. Which means either the actor's hurting himself or—he's not acting."
Next, he analyzed the voice's unusual frequency and dismissed digital manipulation as the cause. "It's just… him."
The video concluded with speculation:
"Either Marcus Vale is the best actor of his generation or we're all hypnotized by something we don't understand."
The video reached a million views within an hour, and the comments exploded:
—"I can't look away. I don't want to, either."
—"He's going to break the internet."
—"This feels like a test and we're all failing."
—"He's already inside my head. What now?"
Olivia leaned back in her chair, picturing millions glued to that same face, drawn toward a single burning point.
Olivia opened the final video, a compilation of global reactions. The amateur footage consisted of webcams, phone cameras, and security feeds from various locations.
Faces revealed shock, fear, or fascination. People reacted with laughter, tears, or simply staring in anticipation.
The video concluded with a montage of fan-made Joker images. The last frame showed an unfamiliar image of the Joker, his head tilted, eyes half-lidded and sad, yet smiling—an enigmatic expression. The image lingered for three silent seconds before ending.
In the dim light, Olivia's reflection appeared on her laptop screen with the Joker's smile hovering above hers. This had escalated beyond virality—it was now mythology.
She grasped her phone as if it were a protective charm. The Joker had become omnipresent and inescapable.
With closed eyes, she heard his laughter echo softly in her mind.
Olivia allowed herself a small smile.
And welcomed it in.
....
Let me know what you guys think, should i replace the chapters with this combined condensed one? what worked? what didn't? let me know