The format comes from online video edits based on Mr Incredible, the hero of Pixar's The Incredibles, in which his familiar smiling face is redrawn in increasingly distorted and unsettling phases. Each new phase raised the stakes, and later phases like this one became shorthand for a situation getting seriously wrong. Shared widely as short clips and sound edits, the meme stuck because it turns a trusted childhood character into something eerie without needing dialogue, making it easy to reuse for horror-themed jokes, cursed edits and dramatic reveals.