Demi Lovato Brought Her Viral Poot Meme To Life For Halloween

Demi Lovato won Halloween before Oct. 31 even arrived. The day before, the singer unveiled her Halloween costume on Instagram, dressing as “Poot Lovato” and bringing the viral meme to life. “Happy halloween and happy one week of intd!!!” she wrote, nodding to her new album It’s Not That Deep. “Been so locked in this era thought i’d let pootvato out.”

If you don’t know the lore, Poot originated a decade ago in 2015, when a Photoshopped image of Lovato was posted on Tumblr, with a fictional backstory claiming that the woman in the photo was actually Lovato’s twin sister. “She was locked in a basement her whole life. This picture was taken the first time she went outside. Her name is Poot,” the former account wrote.

From there, the meme took off, with Tumblr users adding to the backstory in subsequent posts and creating Poot fanfiction. One fan even opened an X (formerly Twitter) account for Poot, which is currently closed with the name “back in the basement,” nodding to the original meme.

Now, Lovato made Poot a reality for Halloween, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the meme. Along with side-by-side photos of her costume and the OG Poot, she fully played into the lore by sharing videos of her trying to leave her garage and giving a tour of her “home,” filled with almost no necessities, set to the tune of Sabrina Carpenter’s “House Tour.”

Lovato also posted a montage showing how the costume came together, featuring extensive makeup, prosthetics, and layered hair extensions. Even her fellow celebs agree that she won the holiday. Charli XCX commented “omg obsessed with you” on Instagram, with Katy Perry writing, “You take the crown my dear.”

Demi’s Relationship With Poot

While Lovato has come to embrace Poot all these years later, she hasn’t always felt good about the meme. In 2015, when the photo first went viral, she posted a pointed message on X, which has since been deleted. “Cool to see a sh*tty angle turn into a meme that circulates the Internet to people's amusement ha,” she wrote.

However, as she explained to Harper’s Bazaar in 2023, she came around to the meme after realizing that the image was actually edited. “When Poot went viral, that actually sucked because I thought that was a real picture of me,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, no. That’s a really bad angle.’ But Poot was photoshopped. Later, I felt better about it because I realized that wasn’t my face.”