Want to Go Viral on Social Media? Watch Silent Movies

What are silent movies?

If you’re coming to this piece with a wholly contemporary sensibility, you may not be familiar with silent film. Here’s a brief history:

At the advent of narrative cinema, the technology did not exist to record and synchronize sound with visual action. So the films from around 1890 to the late 1920s were, as you might guess, silent.

Well, not really “silent.” Oftentimes, one would see a silent film accompanied by live music, be it a piano, organ, or full orchestra. These scorers would help accentuate and play with the visual beats, even providing stylized approximations of sound effects. But that’s the only sound you would hear—no dialogue at all.

Well, except, there was dialogue—it was just projected as a screen-filling subtitle, often coming right after the depiction of the screen performers speaking silent words. These subtitles also functioned as narrative gap fillers, pieces of onscreen narration that would provide crucial context or character feelings when mere visual information wouldn’t suffice.

Today, the silent-film era is largely remembered for its cavalcade of iconic comedians, people like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel, and Oliver Hardy, who would contort their bodies and faces for our amusement and pathos. But there are several iconic works of silent cinema that are both highly influential and deadly serious, like the original “Nosferatu,” “Battleship Potemkin,” and “Metropolis.” 

So how can this classic subset of cinema help with your viral videos right now?

Face and body language 

Because there was no spoken dialogue, silent-film actors had to convey everything through facial expressions and physical gestures. And because the talent pool consisted mostly of vaudevillians, the performance style du jour was heightened and exaggerated, turning even the most common expressions and experiences into over-the-top statements.

The DNA of this performance style is alive and well on social media, where attention spans are short and emotions must be conveyed as quickly and clearly as possible. Plus, don’t forget that many users watch videos without sound, making this exaggerated performance style just as functional as that of the silent-film performers of yore. When someone scrolls silently on their phone, they’re much more likely to pause and observe someone heightening their physicality past 10 than, say, a static person sitting and talking to the camera.

For example, watch any work from Buster Keaton and pay attention to the way he sells incredibly clear-stated character work and comedy with his eyes, face, and body. 

Fun with subtitles

Putting captions on your videos is a must, especially for the many people who watch without sound. But they aren’t simply for legibility. Just as silent films used their dialogue cards to offer more comedy or context, so, too, can you turn the subtitle into a tool for fun.

For example, take a look at this popular take on the “nonchalant” challenge, where performers do an activity (in this case entering an elevator) as “nonchalantly” as possible. 

The physicality of what each person does is funny and relatable on its own—but the subtitles that enter after each action are the real punchline, encapsulating the energy of each performer and giving them a humorous “score” to boot. 

Additionally, standard “characters talking to each other” videos can be punctuated with creative subtitle work. In this Ethan Mead video about the horrors of naming Pokemon, the subtitles convey the emotional and absurd heightening. When characters shout, the subtitles become bigger, canted, and suddenly visible in different areas of the screen. Images of the corresponding Pokemon appear as they’re spoken. And most tellingly, emojis are used as pieces of creator commentary, suffusing what could merely be a helpful tool for legibility with that relatable point of view that’s essential to successful social media content. 

Fun with music

When you think of the quintessential TikTok video, you likely think of the TikTok dance. These kinds of videos are full of exaggerated body movements, facial expressions, and joyful playing with the relationship between an outside stimulus (i.e., music) and the body’s response to it (i.e., dance).

In other words, these dance videos continue to owe lots of their success to the grammar of silent film: 

But what of those who are not dancers? Is there still room to use music in your videos? Well, the most liked video in TikTok’s history is a lip-sync: Bella Poarch raps along to the lyrics to “M to the B” with endearingly huge, even satirical displays of emotions. It’s evidence, again, that successful content is so much more about what a viewer sees and instantly connects with than sound. 

You can use the power of music as a more traditional “film score” to your performance—and often, creators of viral videos choose tracks that heighten their performance (as silent-film performers did before) or ironically counter-balance the stakes to make sure their POV pierces through. 

Here’s a list of movies filled with physical performances, visual gags, and quick-hit bits that would do numbers if they dropped today:  

“One Week” (dir. Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline) 

“Modern Times” (dir. Charlie Chaplin)

“Safety Last!” (dir. Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor)

“Lunatics in Politics” (dir. Richard Smith)