The Cage meme isn't one image but a running set of jokes. Face-swaps drop his wide-eyed stare into unrelated video game and movie scenes, while reaction compilations pull his most operatic freakouts from films like Con Air, The Wicker Man and Vampire's Kiss and treat 'Cage acting' itself as the punchline. His unchanging expression across wildly different roles became shorthand for a specific brand of inexplicable, hit-or-miss intensity5.

The 'Nic Cage is a vampire' thread grew from a 4-by-2.5-inch carte de visite photo dated around 1870 that antique dealer Jack Mörd of Seattle put up on eBay in September 2011 with a $1 million starting bid1. Mörd joked that Cage lets himself age into his seventies or eighties before 'dying' and reappearing rejuvenated somewhere else, a bit picked up widely in the tabloid press1. The photo became a permanent fixture in Cage meme rotations long after the auction ended.

Cage memes typically pair a still or clip from one of his more unhinged performances with unrelated context, whether that's a face-swap onto another actor's role, a photoshop into an old timey portrait, or a YTMND-style audio loop. The common convention is to let his expression carry the joke rather than piling on heavy caption text.