The Internet Wants to Go Out

Something strange has been happening in nightlife over the past few years. Nights built around a 2001 DreamWorks film, or a boyband that split up a decade ago, or a gay hockey romance show, are selling out venues across multiple continents, and none of it has much to do with the music.

With this new wave, you skip the part where you slowly discover your people over years of showing up to the same genre-specific nights, you just walk into a room where everyone already gets it. We wanted to figure out why this is happening now, and what it says about the way people actually want to go out post-pandemic.

Image by @smriker on Pinterest

In 2015, if you'd told someone that thousands of adults would pay good money to spend a Saturday night dressed as an ogre, drinking green cocktails, and dancing to EDM edits of songs from a 2001 DreamWorks film, they would have assumed you were describing a fever dream. When clubs reopened after COVID, most people likely predicted the same thing: people would go feral for nightlife again, pent up and starved for a room full of strangers.

What nobody quite predicted was what those rooms would actually be full of. While the concept of the "Shrek Rave" began as a joke, it snowballed quickly on TikTok, turning into a real, ticketed, touring event, and it never really stopped. There have now been hundreds of these nights, in dozens of countries, run by promoters with no connection to DreamWorks. Cool Is Dead, one of the bigger names doing this in the US, has more than ten dates on the calendar in the next month alone.

The Netherlands and Germany, of all places, have also seen a string of sold-out Shrek Raves over the past few years, a strange fit for two countries usually defined by big-name DJs and serious electronic music pedigree. For these raves, the music was almost beside the point. Nobody was buying tickets because they were fans of the DJ, they were buying a room full of people who were already in on it, and the shared reference did the social work that usually takes some effort to build.

Then there's a very different kind of nostalgia rave, and it's just as big. One Direction wnt on "hiatus" in 2015, and the fandom that grew up on them never really got closure. Around a decade later, that unfinished feeling has turned into its own genre of night out. One Direction raves have popped up worldwide, packed almost entirely with crowds now in their twenties or thirties. People are there to scream the words to "Heart Attack" the way they would have at fourteen, except now with a drink in hand and nobody around to tell them it's embarrassing. It's camp, and a chance to feel like it's still 2014.

Once the "shared reference" formula existed, though, it was only a matter of time before it got pointed at something slightly more current and not fully based on nostalgia. Enter Heated Rivalry, the gay hockey romance TV show that blew up massively and was all anyone was talking about online. People were emotional about the show, the characters, the pairing, and the discourse happening in real time.

Not long after, themed nights built around the show started popping up, playing the soundtrack, screening fan edits on big screens, and encouraging people to show up in jerseys and go a bit feral for the night. These themed nights sold out across mainland Europe, the UK, Asia and the US, all at once, which tells you this wasn't a regional fluke, there was a genuine, if slightly rabid, appetite finding the same outlet everywhere.

All of it points to the same thing: online culture finding its way into physical rooms.

These three examples all land on the same idea: build the night around the identity first, and let the music be the excuse to get everyone in the same room. Nightlife has always been about finding your people. Music does it, subcultures do it, queer and punk scenes have been doing it for decades. What's new is the order of operations. These themed nights flip the old logic of going out; that you liked a genre, you found the nights that played it, and you met your people there over time. This new version skips that entire process; you already know exactly who your people are before you've left the house, because the internet told you, and the party is just the room where you finally all show up in person.

Not all of this is uncomplicated, though. A themed night is still a ticketed product, and fandom is measurably profitable, which means there's a real version of this story where a promoter takes something a community built for free and sells a tidied up, formulaic copy of it back to them. Some Shrek rave dates have taken exactly that criticism on the chin: less underground gathering, more theme park version of one.

So is this organic community building, or very well targeted niche marketing? It's likely a bit of both, depending on the night and who's running it. A few things are converging to make this the moment for it: real exhaustion with generic nights out, a post-pandemic craving for physical rooms after years of screen-mediated everything, and being loud and specific about what you're into has stopped being embarrassing.

The Shrek rave works because everyone in the room agreed in advance to be ridiculous together. The whole appeal is that the usual cost of caring too visibly about something gets suspended for one night.

If a bit about an ogre can fill touring venues, and a TV show can sell out club nights on multiple continents within months of airing, it's not hard to guess what's next. Anime nights, gaming crowds, whatever hyper-specific corner of the internet finds its critical mass next.

The internet can seem like it's making everyone lonelier, but this wave of community nights is proof it's just as good at telling people exactly who else is out there.