“Where the Crawdads Sing” isn’t the only new film in theaters boasting a Taylor Swift influence. Taika Waititi revealed that the screaming goats in his Marvel sequel “Thor: Love and Thunder” were inspired by a video of a goat screaming mixed with Taylor Swift singing “I Knew You Were Trouble.”
In an interview with Insider, the director told the story of how the pair of goats were somewhat inspired by the 2012 viral meme.
“They were never meant to be screaming,” he said of the pair of magical creatures.
The chaotic duo from the comics pull Thor’s ship in the film as he (Chris Hemsworth), Jane (Natalie Portman), Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) and Korg (Taika Taititi) embark on a journey to search for Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale).
“The goats were always going to be in there because they are in the comics, but we didn’t know how they would sound,” Waititi continued. “Then someone in post-production found this meme of a Taylor Swift song that has screaming goats in it. I didn’t even know that existed.”
Someone passed the video along in the process of designing the CGI creatures.
“One of the vendors that was making the CG goats, they just added the Taylor Swift song ‘I Knew You Were Trouble,’ but the fan-made one with the goat sounds, and we just thought it was so funny,” Waititi said.
“It was just a shot of how the CG creatures were coming along, it wasn’t meant for the film or anything, it was just an update. And the screams were freakin’ awesome,” he continued.
In addition to co-writing and directing the film, Waititi voices Korg, Thor’s sidekick of sorts, but that is the extent of his onscreen vocal duties.
“A lot of people think it’s me screaming,” he added. “It’s not.”
The meme Waititi referenced came to be after the music video for Swift’s “I Knew You Were Trouble” was released. A YouTube user posted the video of the 2012 song from Swift’s “Red” album combining the music video with snippets of a screaming goat, synchronizing it to a point in the song where it sounds like the goat is singing along to the chorus.
Swift hasn’t yet responded to this news. “Thor: Love and Thunder” landed in theaters last Friday.