The Evil Is Defeated

About

The Evil Is Defeated is a reaction image or GIF taken from the 2012 comedy horror film The Cabin in the Woods. The image features a Japanese child smiling and holding a frog with the closed caption "The evil is defeated." The reaction GIF became popular on Tumblr in 2015 and has since been used on Reddit and Twitter.

Origin

On April 13th, 2012, the horror-comedy film The Cabin in the Woods was released. On May 15th, 2013, YouTuber Brian Newby uploaded a clip from the movie in which a group of schoolchildren exorcises a demon until it becomes a frog (shown below). The clip gained over 50,200 views in seven years.

On December 31st, 2015, Tumblr user nenamaaaa posted the first known post of the GIF in reaction to the caption, "When you see less and less emo post on Tumblr" and accumulated over 1,000 notes in four years (shown below).

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On March 9th, 2016, Tumblr^[2] user Triaelf9 referenced the GIF in a post:

Sooo you all know the “the evil is defeated” gif thing?
I was telling my husband about this meme last night, and for kicks, I wondered what the Japanese was here. So I looked up the clip and, fun fact….
She doesn’t say this. Not anything near it. All she says is that the spirit of this girl is now in the frog and will live out its days happily. So now, when I see that meme, all I’m going to imagine is the bad thing that stopped is now a frog living… happily ^_;;
It does explain the expression on their faces, they are actually happy here that she’s been saved. It’s a bit of a shame that that’s lost in the English translation ^_;;; but it is a great example of why neeever to trust subs eheheh
SO ANYWAY, fun fact for the day :P

On January 10th, 2019, Redditor icefumo posted the image but labeled to r/destinymemes^[3] and gained 86 points (97% upvoted) in a year (shown below, left). On April 12th, 2020, Twitter user @ExandShadow^[4] replace the frog with an image of Zipper T. Bunny from Animal Crossing with the caption, "We survived everyone #AnimalCrossingNewHorizons" (shown below, right). The tweet received over 690 likes and 140 retweets in a month. CBR^[1] published an article explaining the meme.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References