These friends parodied that celebrity 'Imagine' video with the speech from 'Hereditary'

As people across the globe acclimatise to social distancing and lockdown measures, many of us are turning to Zoom calls and social media as a way of connecting with people.

Celebrities are no different. In recent weeks, we've seen a whole host of Instagram messages and videos from actors, some of which have been better received than others.

It's probably fair to say that Gal Gadot's star-packed rendition of "Imagine" wasn't exactly the most popular effort — but it certainly seems to be inspiring others.

24-year-old LA-based film-maker Austin Harris was one of the many people who saw the viral video ‚ and it ended up prompting him to make his own version.

The twist? Instead of "Imagine," he and his friends performed (of all things) Toni Collette's brutal monologue from the horror movie Hereditary.

"I honestly felt bad about how much they were being roasted because it seemed so earnest," Harris told Mashable. "So I wanted to do an ironic version of that with something that on the surface is absolutely not uplifting."

Behold:

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Harris explained that he chose Hereditary because it's one of his all-time favourite movies.

"What I love most about the movie is that while it’s really scary, it also has a lot of darkly comedic moments, and this monologue really encapsulates that," he said. "Toni Collette is especially incredible in this scene — the range of emotion is insane. There’s some funny lines, some crying, some screaming — it’s really difficult, frankly. So I figured it’d be fun to make my friends try and do that."

Luckily, many of Harris' friends are actors — and judging by the range of performances in the video (including the glorious "ya sista dead" moment from Jaz Garner and the frankly Oscar-worthy crying from Mikey Levitt), they were more than up to the task. Harris explained that he put the monologue into a Google doc and asked everyone to highlight the parts they wanted to read, so he could then stitch the results together.

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"I really made this hoping that all of my friends, and some friends of friends, could see it and laugh," Harris said. "Everyone in the video is either in college or fresh out, most of us in the entertainment field, so we’re always itching to make something, let alone when we’re trapped in our houses with nothing else to do." Obviously in the back of my mind I’m hoping it goes viral, but you can’t get your hopes up for that kind of thing. But when it started going viral — everyone was really excited. I’m especially happy for my actor friends who are getting some attention."

Harris said that everyone was really excited when the video — which at the time of writing has almost 1.5 million views — started going viral.

"I initially made this to sort of make fun of the people who think a video is going to heal the nation, but seeing that it made people laugh in this scary, anxious time really made me happy," he said.