All you see at first is a white leg that ends in a black Vans sneaker, nearly vertical in the air, being pulled by a dark figure. A canopy of trees drifts overhead as the leg is dragged forward. Then the assailant turns to face the camera; but inside a hoodie, the face is no face, just a terrifying horror movie mask. The soundtrack is LA artist Dutch Melrose urging the woman to “Run, baby, run!” But the comments tell another story: “It’s good to see someone ACTUALLY living the dream.” “Nobody save her,” someone else adds with a panting emoji. “She’s exactly where she wants to be.” This is just one in a sweaty dungeon of hundreds of TikTok videos that show women being stalked, grabbed, tortured, tossed to the ground, and handcuffed by scary masked soldiers. The accounts all have names like VeiledVice and unholy_incubus and morallygraymen.
These very popular torture porn videos, a cross between 50 Shades of Grey and Scary Movie, spawned out of BookTok, the corner of TikTok where bibliophiles sling book recs. While some might associate BookTok with the chaste, cerebral primness of Jane Austen and Taylor Swift edits, it’s an exceptionally thirsty space. “Romantasy,” or romantic fantasy, is the hottest genre this decade, its offspring piling up an estimated $610 million in sales in 2024. Rebecca Yarros’ Onyx Storm, about a woman searching for a lost dragon breed, became the fastest-selling book in two decades last year, with 2.7 million copies sold in its first week.
The wet-and-wicked subset of BookTok is specifically called “dark romance,” which has become the unofficial genre name for a strain of new male pop frequently used in these videos. While some editors deploy tasteful music (Massive Attack’s “Angel” is huge) the majority is stuff like October Ends, who sings dramatically over chunky metal riffs. Exploding the Weeknd’s shivery lust with the guttural churn of Deftones, this is toxic codependency music, the perfect soundtrack for Obsession if the movie were more tasteless. Ends howls, “Sex would be so good/It′s cause I’m fucking with your mind/And then I make it rhyme.” Spotify has dozens of user-made playlists with hundreds of thousands of saves with names like “he is obsessed with you… Dark Romance” and “Dark Romance: spicy sex playlist (Freaky songs for wattpad, booktok, Haunting Adeline, smut lovers)”—that second one has over 187,000 saves. (Haunting Adeline is H.D. Carlton’s horror-crime fusion novel about an author living in a gothic mansion who gets stalked; Wattpad is the name of a popular fan-fiction website.)
Inside these playlists are artists like Ex Habit, a 24-year-old from LA with a Yeatian (the rapper, not the Irish poet) hedge of chin beard who describes himself as a “wasted melancholic” and offers a grimly diluted version of the fucked-up fuckboi persona Abel Tesfaye honed on “The Hills.” There’s Chris Grey, a Toronto “dark R&B” specialist who dooms about the apocalypse with the lethargy of a guy lying on his couch and searching for food on Grubhub: “I’d let the world burn for you,” he grunts. “This is how it always had to end/If I can’t have you, then no one can.” This music is often so simplistic—tenth-grade emo-thirst-trap-core with yearning synths, thudding drums, and maybe a lick of guitar—that a machine could do it too. Redditors have been mulling over whether Saint Vice, a BookTok favorite with 680,000 monthly listeners, is AI. The music is all gutless grungegaze with titles like “WORSHIP” and “LOSE CONTROL”; there’s no paper trail of the artist before late last year, no images or performance videos exist online.
“The artists are trying to be famous, and they’re trying to follow the trends,” says Emma, a woman who’s amassed over 670,000 TikTok followers with dark romance clips that feature herself being captured by her husband, Jakub, dressed as a masked man. Numerous artists and agents have propositioned them for promo; they’ve gotten anywhere from $150 to $300 for single-video song usages from artists like Artemas, bbno$, and Teddy Swims, netting thousands of dollars over their two-year TikTok career. Emma and Jakub tell me they’ve turned down many songs that don’t suit the stalker vibe: “Slow and long electric guitar tones,” Emma explains. “Lyrics about love, chasing, passion.” They cite windswept crooners Oscen and Kae as artists who blew up through spamming TikTok videos trying to crack into the BookTok market.
