Cursed images are not downright gross and scary. They only have a hint of the disturbing or the unsettling. To each their own, of course: some people love the movie Terrifier and its follow-up for the graphic and gross-out violence. Others are terrified (wink, wink) at the thought of seeing blood, even if on screen.
Experts say that we respond more strongly to disgusting or gross stimuli than to something emotionally neutral. Some argue that it's an evolutionary response: we avoid things that we're scared of or that disgust us. That's why it captures our attention: for safety reasons.
But since cursed images aren't outright disgusting and scary, they're more of a "constrained risk." That's a term used to describe things like rollercoasters or spicy food. Things people can enjoy without actually being in physical danger. At least, that's what psychologist Nina Strohminger suggests.
"Any negative feeling has the potential to be enjoyable when it is stripped of the belief that what is happening is actually bad," she writes. "Leaving behind physiological arousal that is, in itself, exhilarating or interesting." When we look at cursed images, we know that none of the subjects in them are in any danger. More often than not, they're manufactured for the Internet and other netizens to enjoy.
The more interesting question is why we can't look away when we see a cursed image or want to see even more. The popularity of the infamous 50/50 subreddit in the 2010s can be one extreme example of our morbid curiosity. Cursed images are a tamer version of that. A creator of a cursed images page on Instagram explained the phenomena to Paper: "We love that tolerable forbidden zone, not too disgusting to turn around, but weird enough to keep us looking."
Ryan Milner, an assistant professor in communications at the College of Charleston and author of The World Made Meme, has another theory. He says we like them because they're scary and creepy. Ultimately, they make us feel something, and that's their main appeal. "[They provoke] different emotions that make us feel something. And we share what makes us feel something."
Milner traces the origins to cursed images to Creepypastas. "The thing around Creepypasta stuff is that sometimes it blurs the lines between genuinely, earnestly supposed to be scary and something that's scary but also playful and funny. You can get that with cursed images as well, that balance between stuff that's supposed to be scary, that's supposed to make you raise your eyebrows, stuff that is striking and funny in a really kind of morbid way."
Food is often involved in cursed images. Már Másson Maack writes that the purpose of food in cursed pictures is to remind us of our mortality and solidify our lack of agency in this world. "Food crosses the boundaries of our bodies and we're sickeningly dependent on it, reminding us we're never fully in control of our surroundings or an independent force in this world."
