Hellmo

Origin

Hellmo, also known as ‘Elmo Rise’, is an image macro of Elmo surrounded by flames. The Elmo is indeed the Sesame Street character, but the picture never came from the show. The original is a birthday cake photographed for the baking-fail blog Cake Wrecks on November 1st, 2012. Piped in icing, the Elmo face came out with its proportions and eyes askew, giving it a stricken, almost possessed expression; the blog’s owner wrote that it looked like someone who would give you all the candy you wanted if you would only please not hurt him.

What turned the photo into a meme was a single word. On June 28th, 2013, Tumblr user teruteru666 reblogged the Cake Wrecks image with the caption ‘rise’ — the moment a failed cake decoration was recast as a being that ascends. That post passed 250,000 notes by October 2015. The form in wide use today — a GIF of Elmo rising amid flames on a black background — was posted on February 14th, 2014 by Mike Diebold to the Tumblr account Gnarville, captioned ‘All hail Hellmo, our dark lord of the internet’. The name Hellmo was fixed there.

Spread

Diebold’s repost to his alternate Tumblr account Clamville on May 4th, 2014 went on to gather over 110,000 likes and 190,000 reposts across the following eleven years, becoming the standard circulating copy. Derivatives placing other characters in the same flames followed: on September 15th, 2015, LiveJournal user blankstare made a variant combining the meme with SpongeBob SquarePants imagery.

Though it began on Tumblr, the meme has been unusually long-lived, migrating to Twitter, TikTok and YouTube and being rediscovered by each new cohort. The gap between the original context — a children’s television character — and the hellfire staging is wide, and the emotion lands from a single image with no explanation needed, so it survived every platform shift.

Usage

It is a reaction image for the state of enjoying something you probably should not be enjoying. It reads as mischievous delight rather than anger.

• Being gleeful after causing trouble, or laughing at someone else’s misfortune
• Reacting to a situation that is pure chaos
• With the ‘rise’ caption, when something long dormant resurfaces

In Korea, where Elmo is not as widely recognised as in the United States, the picture tends to circulate simply as ‘burning Elmo’, and the fact that the original is a botched birthday-cake decoration is comparatively little known.

Sources

• Know Your Meme, ‘Elmo Rise’ — the Cake Wrecks post of November 1st, 2012; teruteru666’s ‘rise’ reblog of June 28th, 2013 (250,000 notes); the Gnarville GIF and ‘All hail Hellmo’ caption of February 14th, 2014; the Clamville repost of May 4th, 2014; the SpongeBob variant of September 15th, 2015
• Daily Dot, ‘Elmo on Fire Meme (AKA Hellmo): History & More’ — on the meme’s names and usage context
• Know Your Meme, ‘Elmo Rise’ image entry — the flame image in standard circulation