I am sure this is not your first time coming across cursed images on the internet, so you might have a sense of what they are, however, it feels difficult to describe them. Usually, they have an eerie mood about them, it feels like these images should not exist, and most of the time, they seem as if there is no apparent meaning to them.
In a previous interview with the founder of cursed.image5, we got an idea of what kind of images they look to post. The most important factor for cursed images is that they “need to talk for themselves. You don’t need context to get the joke, it’s an image where the longer you look, the worse they get. Most importantly, there must be some chaos, something that makes people's skin crawl like putting milk in tea before the water."
Other people have also described that the best-cursed images are the ones in a mundane setting, but right away after seeing one, you know there is something wrong or unusual about it. And somehow, we can’t get enough of them. Francis McAndrew, a professor of psychology at Knox College, has perfectly described why that is in an interview. "We are drawn to 'cursed images' because they somehow present us with a nagging ambiguity. Things that we cannot quickly make sense of trouble us and hold our attention, and we feel compelled to analyze them until we feel as if we understand them.”
Obviously, none of these images terrify us because we are not essentially afraid of the things portrayed in them. As in one of the other interviews on Bored Panda, Coltan Scrivner, behavioral scientist and expert on the science of horror and the morbid, shared an insight into what initially makes us scared and what creeps us out. “When we are sure we are facing something dangerous, we feel afraid. When we are facing something that is more ambiguous, we feel creeped out.”
Certainly, we as humans are weird, and it is quite fun to find these little quirks that we all, for one reason or the other, have. Luckily, the internet is fast in normalizing us being a tad strange, so to celebrate our weirdness, we have collected a few similar posts on Bored Panda that you might enjoy. From oddly terrifying images to mildly terrifying pics, we have just the content to scratch your itch for creepy stuff.
