When Octavia Spencer signed on to star in Blumhouse’s horror feature Ma last year, she was pretty clear about her intentions: Scraping off some of that “Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer” mystique that Hollywood likes to apply to people (whether they’re interested in it, or not), and get down to some over-the-top, silly, violent fun. (Ditto her old The Help director, Tate Taylor, who reportedly pitched the movie to Jason Blum with the line “I want to do something really fucked up.”) Whether the movie achieved those goals is a wider question—neither critics, nor audiences, were especially receptive to it—but pretty much everybody agreed that Spencer seemed to be having a hell of a time while making it.
At the same time, the movie took on a life of its own online—maybe spurred on by the tonally bizarre trailer, or Spencer’s off-kilter performance, or even just its eye-catchingly two-letter title. In any case, Ma memes became A Thing, at least for a bit. (People actually getting to see the movie probably didn’t help maintain the Mamentum, though.) And while the Ma energy has faded, the products of Mania persist, where anyone could find them with a vigorous enough search online. Which leads us to this weekend, when a miracle happened: Spencer apparently stumbled over the Ma memes, and she absolutely loves them.