20 "Willem Dafoe Looking Up" Memes That Perfectly Capture Impending Dread

The meme shows a close-up shot of actor Willem Dafoe, playing Vincent van Gogh, looking straight up at the sky with his eyes wide open and mouth slightly apart. His expression looks shocked or helpless.

The footage comes from the official trailer for the film At Eternity's Gate, which dropped on September 5, 2018. The specific frame happens at the 1:29 mark.

It became a meme format on iFunny around May 2020, used mostly as a GIF caption. One of the earliest logged versions was posted by iFunny user Lordtard on May 22, 2020. Another variation referencing an older shock-humor image went viral on the platform shortly after, around May 28, via reposts. The format later moved to Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok as a standard reaction for looking at an upcoming threat.

The format works by matching a regular or helpless situation with a massive threat coming from above.

• Ant Colony: A literal take on the visual. It pairs a basic human issue (getting sick) with the total destruction of an ant hill to create contrast in scale.
• Depression: A twist on the threat idea. Instead of being shocked by a new bad situation (winter), the person is already dealing with it year-round, making the upcoming threat irrelevant.
• Gaming Damage: A gaming-specific joke. It uses the helpless look to show what it feels like when a player gets targeted by a specific character's unblockable combo (Pantheon's W in League of Legends) and loses all their health instantly.