The first identified cursed image originated from a Tumblr blog in 2015, with a female photography and film student who was interested in searching for forgotten flash photography. She explains that some of them had an eerie mood about them, like something captured from another life. The blog creator was particularly fascinated with finding photos of dark, empty rooms, mannequins, and costumes, which eventually became common themes among cursed images.
The original photo was of an older man (click to see) surrounded by crates of red tomatoes in his basement, staring at the camera with a straight face. There’s nothing unsettling about any of it, but with the new caption “This image is cursed,” it became something entirely different. The picture suddenly gave off a strange feeling that you'd accidentally walked in on someone having a tomato ritual that you weren’t supposed to witness. A wave of unease and confusion washes over you, even just thinking about it.
The puzzlement here is created through a picture taken with an old flash camera or phone that often has an amateurish feel, containing odd specks of light and random things placed in very unusual ways. Bonus points if it’s slightly out of focus. This particular deviation from the normal creates a sense of unease and creepiness in our brains.
The tomato man image didn’t exactly go viral, but the concept of the cursed image really stuck, with copycat blogs popping up on Tumblr and then spreading to all the other social platforms. Now, almost ten years later, a community of eerie image collectors is thriving, each with its own quirks and explanations of what it means to be jinxed. Just like the dysfunctional furniture on the Instagram page “UglyDesign” or odd ways to use food on the “BoysWhoCanCook” feed.
Once your eyes land on a cursed image, it’s undeniably difficult to look away. Their appeal might be related to sensation-seeking - a tendency to pursue new and different feelings or experiences. In modern society, it’s made us magpies looking for new and shiny weirdness. Additionally, the feeling of being creeped out is our body's response to an ambiguous threat that requires a closer inspection to decide whether to fight, run, or ignore. It combines what’s comfortable and uncertain, driving our curiosity further down the road into an uncanny valley.
Going even further back, the roots of cursed images can be traced to easily shareable horror stories called “creepypasta.” They were mainly created to post on forums that discussed everything spooky and mystical. At the start of this community, users were mostly anonymous, allowing them to copy and paste any stories they’d like. Massive sharing of the borrowed texts was eventually titled "copypasta” which led to the creation of "creepypasta.”
