'Saltburn' gives 'Murder On The Dancefloor' new life 20 years after its release
While everyone was holed up at home for the holidays, Emerald Fennell's shocking — or not-so-shocking depending on who you ask — tale of class and obsession in the early 2000s, Saltburn, hit streaming...and bombarded our Twitter/X timelines and TikTok FYPs.
Starring Barry Keoghan as Oliver, a weird little freak, and Jacob Elordi as Felix, a gorgeous charismatic rich boy, the film generated endless discourse as seen in the emergence of Felix "fancams" and the now infamous bathwater-drinking scene inspiring homemade goods, but no part got more air time than the film's final sequence where Oliver dances around Felix's family's estate fully naked to the 2001 hit "Murder On The Dancefloor" by Sophie Ellis-Bextor. So perhaps it's unsurprising that its impact has left the Film Twitter-verse and entered the charts.
It's joined the likes of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" as songs given a second life by zeitgeisty media in the TikTok era. On Dec. 31 — three days after Saltburn became available on Amazon Prime Video — "Murder On The Dancefloor" had its highest daily global streams on Spotify clocking in at 1.5 million. It also entered the Global Spotify chart for the first time. Today it reached no. 1 on Spotify's Viral 50 chart.
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On New Year's Eve, Ellis-Bextor posted a TikTok recreating Oliver's dance moves wearing antlers similar to the ones he sports in the film. It garnered over 4.3 million views and nearly 500,000 likes.
That's not the only use of the song on TikTok. A video posted by @ellie__.e dancing to the track in a large house was recirculated on Twitter with the caption, "Saltburn gave rich people a trend to do and I love it," which sparked debate over the film's murky class politics.
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But the song is mostly being used on TikTok either to react to Saltburn or the "things I suffer from" trend where users list the acronyms of all the things they suffer from. Regardless, "Murder On The Dancefloor" is a testament to Saltburn's online impact — and Keoghan's dance moves.
Elena is a tech reporter and the resident Gen Z expert at Mashable. She covers TikTok and digital trends. She recently graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in American History. Email her at [email protected] or follow her @ecaviar_.
