To someone who hasn’t been particularly chronically online over the last decade, explaining what cursed images are can be a challenge. Words like “weird” or “bizarre” don’t quite do them justice. Honestly, trying to define them feels almost pointless—it’s something you just have to see to truly understand.
Still, there have been attempts to pin down a definition for the elusive cursed image. If you fire up its Wikipedia entry, you’ll find it described as “a picture (usually a photograph) that is perceived as mysterious or disturbing due to its content, poor quality, or a combination of the two” and and as something meant to make you wonder why the image even exists in the first place.
A personal favorite, however, might be the Urban Dictionary’s definition. In a 2017 post, someone referred to a cursed image as “any image that can incite the 5 W’s in a person—these 5 W’s being who, what, when, where, and why.” According to the entry, it’s the lack of answers to these questions that makes a cursed image truly cursed.
Perhaps the most identifiable part of a cursed image is its history. The concept originated in 2015 from a Tumblr blog called cursedimages. The very first post featured an elderly farmer standing in a wood-paneled room, surrounded by crates of red tomatoes.
In a 2019 interview with Paper, the blog’s creator reflected on this image, saying, “It’s the perfect cursed image to me because there’s nothing inherently unsettling about any part of it. It’s a totally mundane moment transformed into something else by the camera and the new context I've given it.”
But the term really started gaining popularity later in 2016, thanks to the X account (formerly known as Twitter) @cursedimages. In a 2016 interview with Gizmodo, writer Hudson Hongo spoke with the account’s owner, who explained that they had come across “one or two” Tumblr posts featuring “unexplainable and odd” pictures simply captioned as “cursed image.” Fascinated by these photos, the owner began seeking out similar images and, after collecting a number of them, decided to share them all in one place.
That same year, Brian Feldman interviewed Doug Battenhausen, the creator of the Tumblr blog internethistory, for New York Magazine. When Feldman asked him what the appeal of cursed images was, Battenhausen explained: “It’s a lot of things. It’s the mystery of the photo, it’s the strange aesthetics of them, it’s seeing a place that you’ve never seen before, or an intimate glimpse into somebody’s life.”
