Cursed images are another strange phenomenon you can randomly encounter once you fall down the internet rabbit hole.
The concept apparently originated from a Tumblr blog in 2015. The first cursed image was an old farmer surrounded by crates of tomatoes (not that weird in my opinion… early days).
How could we defined these disconcerting visuals?
Cursed images are the kind of pictures causing a sudden WTF reaction. According to a post on Reddit, a cursed image is any picture that can incite the 5 W’s in a person, these 5 W’s being Who, What, When, Where and Why. In a nutshell, cursed images are so weird that they elicit a strange reaction, somewhere between a nervous laugh and a pang of disgust.
The person who launched the trend on Tumblr told Papermag that “the effect is visceral. A cocktail of dread, unease, disgust and confusion washes over you. They’re images of memories that never actually happened to you, but the moment you see them, it’s suddenly happening to you.”
We could argue that the very best cursed images are producing a true unstagrammed moment.
Most family photos from the 1970s and the 1980s would probably fall into this category. So ugly they’re trendy.
Contemporary cursed images borrow some of the inadvertently kitsch 1980s aesthetics, delivering a kind of surreal post modern still life.
If you pause for a second, you can imagine a story behind each cursed image.
Challenging the staged beauty of photoshopped selfies, violating our sense of world order, they have an unsettling attractive power, inviting us into an alternate dimension, far from the clichés of mainstream media photo galleries.
Parents dressed as children, toothpaste sandwiches, 10-legged dogs, creepy mutants blending dolls and tyres, overflowing urinals… the weirder the better. There are now websites and social media accounts dedicated to specific cursed verticals, including the filthy Scary Toilets.
Cursed images are pointless visual guilty pleasures. Once you start browsing cursed images, your brain’s craving for more. Cursed images are the typical rabbit hole distraction!
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© RabbitMaze – 2020
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