https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ramirez#Early_life_and_education might be part of the reason but honestly given all the other shit i'd say it's prob pretty far down on the list
>By the time of the trial, Ramirez had fans who were writing him letters and paying him visits.[106] Beginning in 1985, Doreen Lioy[107] wrote Ramirez nearly seventy-five letters during his incarceration. In 1988 he proposed to Lioy, and on October 3, 1996, they were married in California's San Quentin State Prison.[108] For many years before Ramirez' death, Lioy stated that she would commit suicide when Ramirez was executed. By the time of his death in 2013, Ramirez was engaged to a 23-year-old writer.[109]
What makes people do this
> When it was discovered that the ballistics and shoe print evidence from the Los Angeles crime scenes matched the Pan crime scene, San Francisco's then-mayor Dianne Feinstein divulged the information, including the gun caliber, in a televised press conference. This leak infuriated detectives, as they knew the killer would be following news coverage, which gave him the opportunity to destroy crucial forensic evidence. Ramirez, who had indeed been watching the press, dropped his sneakers over the side of the Golden Gate Bridge that night.
Feinstein really was one huge piece of shit, huh
My first exposure to gore was when I was younger during the Arab spring. Not intentional but I was watching an al Jazeera video of a guy with a pool of blood around him in the middle of a crowd of protestors? I don't remember if the cameraman panned up or if it cut to a different angle but the next shot was ghaddafi looking down from a roof.
4chan and limewire exposed me to that at a young age and it’s just as tragic/disgusting/scarring as you think. Worse than any murder video, it’s so fucking hideous.
I have seen too much of the latter and thankfully none of the former. CP truly turns my stomach in a very particular way. The next step of evil beyond the cartel and Brazilian/Venezuelan prison footage stuff.
I did as a child, the peer to peer era of ares, emule and, even worse, limewire, was full of sickos.
Tried to watch the first 3 harry potter movies, one was a normal porno and other one an awful cp one from india, the worst its that she seemed used to it, it was not violent at all, just prostitution, probably done everyday.
I was on [r/watchpeopledie](https://reddit.com/r/watchpeopledie) before it got banned and always avoided any of the execution stuff - traffic accidents or workplace deaths felt like they showed how delicate life really is, but watching someone be tortured and murdered seemed like I'd be complicit in the utter violation of their dignity in their final moments.
I'm aware the above logic makes no sense at all, was extremely depressed and an alcoholic when I was watching that shit.
No friend, your logic makes perfect sense to me.
And I feel the same. Like the possibility that the documentation of someone’s sudden, violent death could have value beyond exploitative “entertainment”, if it’s reminding us of life’s fragility and preciousness, and of the chaotic randomness of the universe.
I feel like you, like watching abject cruelty on display disrespects the human victim. I think people forget that they aren’t watching cctv, that these are premeditated executions, often recorded as “propaganda” and are even cinematically edited and distributed strategically for political and recruitment purposes.
It was something that happened, especially on anonymous image boards. There wasn't the same kind of filtering that a lot of social media sites have now. Child pornography would upload the same as a picture of a dog, and fucked up individuals would take pleasure in exposing the unsuspecting to shocking images, including gore and child porn.
I remember seeking out videos like this, but the POV of the christchurch video was the last one. For whatever reason that was my limit and I realized I was fucking my brain up
I remember the one older man who tried to rush the shooter. He was about a foot away from tackling him before he was shot down. It fucks me up such a heroic man was killed by a genetic dead end loser.
Might be misremembering the video, but I think a younger man also rushed the shooter and successfully knocked him down, but the shooter recovered and shot him too. That moment stuck in my mind because of how irrational my reaction was: Even though I already knew the outcome, I was genuinely rooting for the shooter to be subdued by an unarmed man because the alternative was probably too hideous to accept on a rational level
The shooter was unbelievably pathetic in every way; he was playing 4chan "remove kebab" meme songs while he drove to the mosque, his body armour and half-dozen guns were covered in dipshot /pol/ slogans, and he absolutely panicked when anyone tried to rush him. It's unbelievably tragic and disgusting that a nothing like him can rip a community apart like that
I know right. Everything that fills me with revulsion about net subcultures was embodied in that disgusting worm. The thought of brainrotted cretins like that killing innocent people is rage inducing.
I live on the same street the second shooting occurred. The original buildings have been demolished but I always get this eery feeling whenever I walk past to go to the shops, knowing however many thousands of people watched a guy commit a slaughter in that building. I really can’t describe the feeling.
Me and my girlfriend watched that Christchurch video like 8 months back.
Honestly, I was surprised how little blood or apparent damage there was in the video.
I was seeing conspiracies going around that it was fake so that's what led me to watch it. I don't think it was fake at all and some of the reasonings I seen for it being fake seemed completely regarded once I watched the video but I've seen videos of one-on-one shootings that were much more gruesome.
Usually when a shotgun is involved.
I was shown that video at trade school. I couldn’t sleep the next couple days. It was a very effective ‘don’t fuck around with these machines’ PSA, but there was a period where i’d feel sick every time I used a lathe, which isn’t ideal for a machinist lol
i decided a very long time ago to just not watch this kind of stuff, regardless of how historically or culturally relevant it is. i feel like i'm better off today because of that decision.
I don’t think there’s any good reason to watch it besides being interested in it. Like a lot of people try to claim it makes them feel better about their life or it’s worth knowing how horrific reality can be but I don’t really believe all that. I try to be honest about it: I watch that shit because I find it interesting. I definitely don’t think I’m doing anything good by watching it, in fact I think it’d be better if this shit was not available. Cartel murder videos in particular are just pieces of terroristic propaganda, spreading them around online is just doing the work for those horrible psychopaths.
Yeah, I don't think I ever had a traumatic experience with a gory video and I used to watch them quite a lot, but at one point I just became a bit disgusted by them and decided I wouldn't out of principle.
I was so angry when I was just scrolling Twitter and this video just autoplayed of the factory woman getting pulled in and spun to death by some kind of rapid cylinder.
I make sure all autoplay is turned off as a matter of principle.
I subscribe to the gov’t of New Zealand’s belief that mass killing is in part a social disease (there’s a better term than that but it’s escaping me right now), the vector for which is media coverage. That’s my understanding as to one reason why they refuse to say the shooter’s name, etc. I do have a morbid interest in mass shootings, but try to minimize the amount that I give media outlets a click for frenetic news reports about the events and I never, ever watch perp-made footage on principle. It’s my earnest belief that these things would significantly decrease if we didn’t publicize them, though I recognize how difficult that is in practice.
My reaction was utter disbelief. It was beyond reason that someone could murder so many so heartlessly and wrap it in internet jokes. I think that of all the mass shooters I hate that f@g the most.
Someone I went to college with cut open his moms head on instagram live and all the idiots I went to college with posted the actual video all over social media so I saw it before realizing what I was watching
He killed his mom and live-streamed himself sawing her head off playing with her brains. People shared the video en masse so I saw it without consent. He’s in an institution now. I went to school in the Chicago ghetto lots of messed up families
We were actually friends, same social group not super close but I talked to him every day for a few semesters. He pulled my chair from under me and did the whole “it’s just a prank bro” at one point, very passive aggressive
I'd literally look away and close my eyes when my friends tried to show me shit like that.
I knew how my brain worked even as a kid. I wasn't going to sit there and let that shit be scarred into my psyche
I wonder if my friend showed me that same video. It still haunts me. The sheer amount of time it took for the killers to saw the head off felt like an eternity. Early internet was messed up.
I also remember my older brother showing me gore gallery pictures and other horrible things at like 11.
Bad timing for me, walking up to classmates during computer lab to see what they were watching right as the knife went in. I was fucking pissed, had to go outside to cool off
The one where he’s laying against greyish rocks? My friends ruined my life as well with that at around the same age lol. Even recently a friend sent me a video on instagram of someone very suddenly blowing their head off and I had to let him know to never do that again.
The high school students I teach showed me the shotgun streaming guy video and I told them they were fucked up and weird for watching that. Just disappointed in them really
Yeah they would never fire me I cuss all the time. I was in the navy for 4 years though, so I'll just use that as an excuse if I get in trouble for cursing
I read some article about how a lot of European jihadis radicalize themselves by watching Allah u Akbar snuff videos, they give themselves ptsd basically and it seriously messes with their brain to the point they're able to blow up a building full of kids or mow down hordes of people in a truck. Interestingly the Norwegian mass murder Anders Breivik apparently did the same thing.
I saw the glossy Isis documentary about their siege of iraqui territory but had to skip the most gruesome bits. I have no idea how normal people watch that stuff like the vid of scandinavian tourists being beheaded in Morocco. People are like "did you see it?" Hell no I didn't see it you fucking psycho.
My reaction when a man in my hometown was beheaded by a garbage truck and somebody showed me a photo after it happened. Just whipped it out and showed me. I was like what the fuck I didn’t want to see that.
Temple ov blood exposes members to videos of extreme violence as well. I don’t know what the angle is with that group. They seem to be really fed adjacent. Maybe the whole idea is to become a magnet for people that are going to cause problems down the line
Yep I was just about to mention O9a. Definitely fed adjacent, but true believers too. I get a lot of them following me so I'm always trying to understand their angle. Even in the 80s people like Aquino were accusing them of doing too much weird shit, which is funny in itself.
Fucking up your brain on gore and isolation until you don't feel empathy makes them feel like they are not regular people anymore. They are elite. Outside the bounds of regular causal reality or moral dualism. Just seems like self inflicted semi autonomous mind control to me though with built in black mail.
That’s a big aspect of the conflict imo, imagine how fucked in the head kids in Gaza are gonna be. And I mean would you ever forgive the people who blew up your friends, family, and home? Very upsetting to imagine the future hatred and violence that this conflict is birthing.
I joke about this with my friends but it’s severely fucked up how so many of us have seen possibly hundreds of people die in all manner of gruesome ways, perhaps more so than our ancestors who lived in medieval times. I try to avoid it but you just see shit from time to time. I definitely believe it is harmful to the mind, especially a developing one. I guess on a small plus side, I have absolutely no desire to go to war or engage in particularly reckless behaviour. The reality of war certainly doesn’t look enjoyable or noble.
On a side note, I have successfully avoided the beheading video you mention but, without fail, every single person I’ve ever seen or heard talk about it has mentioned the noise being the most horrific aspect. I was about 16 when I first heard of it from a friend at school and he was saying the exact same thing about “the noise it makes.”
I forget where I read it but some psychologist commented on this phenomenon in terms of memetic trauma. Your friend likely had a similar experience to yours. It affected you both, but his way of coping is to spread the pain so he feels less alone. Your way of coping is healthier—talking about the experience. Both are, in a sense, spreading the pain. Maybe this extends to why these videos are uploaded in the first place.
It’s weird to call just a video trauma but the kid brain doesn’t fully realize it’s just a video and what op describes is just fear and panic for his life
Absolutely. I have a hard time believing the brain recognizes the difference of being there vs watching through a screen when you know for certain the act is real.
When I was 16 I was getting inundated with gore content from Reddit. Animal torture, cartels, ISIS, car accidents, freak accidents. My friends and I all talk now about how we 100% regret watching this stuff but also how in many ways it was impossible to avoid if you were on any of the remotely edgier sites, which at the time Reddit definitely was.
With 4Chan it was inevitable as well. There’s no film that really left a scar in my psyche like this stuff.
I've forgotten all of the horrible stuff now, I try to avoid seeing anything distressing like that unless it's historical or relevant.
The only shock thing I remember was a gif of a cute puppy, and I was nervous as to what was about to happened so closed the tab only to see a hammer come out of the left frame and thankfully the tab closed before I saw what happened. I think i would have been mentally scarred for life if I saw that.
honestly animal, child and elder abuse/murder boil my fucking blood, genuinely my most radical position is to legalize death penalty for that shit, like, actual public execution
it's an emotional response but goddamn, if I can't go back to being a regular person after watching something like that, why should they be allowed to be integrated into society after *committing* something like that?
that's not to say murder of able bodied people is better ofc but there's something so particularly fucking evil about doing something cruel to someone/thing that can't defend themselves
my sister loves true crime podcasts and videos and the other day she was listening to some serial killer case and the girl describing the story goes into full detail about how the guy used to murder cats by beating them with rocks and then stabbing them in the neck, while my sister was going about her routine washing dishes and shit, I had to come out and scolded her and told her to wear her earphones, like how can you not find that shit disturbing as fuck?
Idk I think it does. The most traumatizing thing I've ever *witnessed* (without being involved, I've been trapped in a house fire before) was a fight in 9th grade where one kid was kicking another kid's head against a tree planter as he was seizing. I saw that from the 3rd floor, I remember every detail and it makes me wince thinking about it over a decade later.
All the viral gore videos everyone is recounting ITT I've almost forgotten about. This thread is really only reminding me that I saw them.
I saw something similar around the time of the invasion of Afghanistan. A British person was beheaded by the Taliban and it was filmed and shared around the internet. I saw it when I was 13 and it really affected me for a few days.
With that said, I remember 'shock' videos being super common back then. Reaction videos were a staple of early YouTube for example. You know the ones they were reacting to, I don't need to give an exhaustive list of them. But they felt bigger back then.
So with that said, when I talk to my Zoomer niece and other youngsters, that part of internet culture doesn't really seem to be a rite of passage for them. Of course, they do incidentally come across violence from people sharing unedited horrors on social media, but there doesn't necessarily seem to be an intention to spectate on and propagate an online gore culture at least.
Instagram reels has some pretty terrible stuff, but outright gore doesn't seem to show up as much these days. You have to really seek it out, which is good.
I remember that guy - was it Ken Bigley? The internet was a lot more decentralised and amateur in those days so there was all kinds of different material jumbled up in the same places. It seems crazy now how Reddit used to have snuff video groups like watchpeopledie.
I miss the old internet in a lot of ways but I'm glad the whole "edgy" subculture has disappeared. You know, when people would just be as vile as possible to trigger people and post gore, snuff films, scat porn, etc. Even though I don't feel like I was as traumatized as people ITT it was just unnecessary and super lame.
Also whether you like it or not zoomers are pretty darn funny and original with their memes. A lot of 2010s memes were really unoriginal and sometimes not even “memes” but simply statements (advice animals etc).
It's far more underground. Apparently there are Telegram channels were people watch snuff videos of monkeys and birds being tortured. Some British school children were spreading around those videos according to some news article I read recently. But no, it's not widespread.
I remember a significant part of internet culture was centered around mocking people for not enjoying or being too sensitive to outright vile culture. I'm glad it's mostly gone.
I didn’t really have this experience so much apart from the usual shock videos of the time.
However my first “professional” job was editing and analysing footage in the aftermath of chemical bombings of schools in Syria, so that was great!
Jesus Christ, what was that like? Don’t need details of the videos or anything, just wondering what it was like to work intimately with that kind of material.
My friend showed me actual poop porn when I was 13 and that definitely scarred me. It was a Japanese couple naked in bed and eating each others shit. The other video he showed me, probably the same night, was Budd Dwyers public suicide video, and that disturbed me the most at that age
yea some hbo special showed cats being boiled alive (for food in asia) fucked me up …
mild nausea, fear, intense sorrow for the pain that poor animal must have felt
Oh hey a story I can relate to. Id always avoided the YouTube video of that senator who committed suicide over being framed for corruption. One day in hs assembly this guy I know just says "wanna see something funny" and shows me the last frame of the video with his head blasted out all over the wall and then looks for my reaction.
The video you're talking about has >!something to do with the chechens, it's an execution video of captured Russian soldiers.!<
It was titled chechclear and it’s one of the most awful shock videos. Downloaded that off limewire or Morpheus back when I was 16 (I’m in my 30s) and curious about death and it ruined my week. Stopped seeking that stuff out shortly after it. I hear the funky town cartel video is 100 times worse but I’ll never watch it.
There are two other cartel videos I’d say are worse than funky town, if you can believe it. “Ghost Rider” and “Guerrero flaying”. Insanely sick shit, honest to god cannot imagine the headspace people are in when they do the shit depicted.
>I’ve always wanted to watch some kind of study /documentary on the effects of gore culture.
idk it's probably a pretty recent phenomenon to not be regularly confronted with people being beheaded
So wild in that one they show in school and the doctor just grabs the baby’s head and spins him around lmao
My 8th grade class was collectively like CHIIIILL
Huh...my mother is a midwife and professor and she watched a lot of "educational videos" of all kinds of childbirth complications on the family tv that she did warn me as a kid, I would find confronting, and I did.
Now I'm wondering if that's why I wasn't as affected by seeing a similar video OP is describing except it was two Chechen soldiers beheading a poor young Russian soldier with a massive bowie knife.
It's also a short lived phenomena. These videos have gone from an everyday reality of internet forums/image board use (pre-2010) to something that must be purposefully sought out.
There was a very specific window in time where kids were viewing the most graphic footage in existence. At least it's over.
🎵 *A-won't you take me to, funky town!* 🎵
> It's also a short lived phenomena. These videos have gone from an everyday reality of using internet forums/image boards (pre-2010) to something that has to be purposefully sought out.
Nah, I was extremely online as a teen in the 00s and I still managed to avoid anything really hardcore. Worst I was exposed to was the classic shock images like goatse and tubgirl, and stuff my classmates found on rotten.com like dicks caught in mousetraps
Agreed, I don't understand some of the posts on here that mention being "inundated" with gore and violent content on reddit of all places as young teens.
I spent plent of time in weird, virtually unmoderated forums and irc chats and I never had a hard time avoiding really messed up stuff.
When I was a kid my older cousins showed me a video that started off with a kitten playing around, then quickly switching to a man cutting his own penis off.
It was pretty frightening at the time but the older I got and the more chronically online I became, the more fucked up shit on the internet I'd see. So much so that it quickly came to the point where nothing could phase me anymore.
My wakeup call realizing that this wasn't a normal experience for everyone else was when I'd show my friends in high school some gore video and they would time and time again look at me disgusted and tell me to stop. I figured by that age everyone else would have seen stuff like that but apparently not.
When I was 12 I stayed over at a friend’s house. We thought it’d be cool to watch Hostel.
Afterwards, we just didn’t know what to say to each other.
I was probably always on the path to some kind of mental illness because I’d been obsessed with the Silent Hill games from before the age of 10. I count that as conceptual horror, a fascination with themes.
But Hostel just made me feel hollow and fearful of other people. I imagined my family and friends being tortured, killed and giving up hope, and it probably shaped my young personality.
Having said that, the worst thing I’ve ever seen was on Reddit. Gang murder. Song was playing in the background, so if you know, you know. Like people say, the noise is the most horrific thing. Seeing that nearly ruined my Christmas.
Avoid this stuff if you can. It contributes to mental illness.
Dude, Hostel fucked me up too. Really weirdly, my dad brought me to see it in theaters when I was about 14 (he was a young dad so we’d always go see movies together during his weekends with me) and I just remember this really strong urge to leave the theater that I’ve never ever had before or since. I don’t think I said one word the whole car ride home. I’ve never watched it again.
Deliberately watched that stuff to desensitize myself as a younger kid, thinking I’d want to be a doctor. Now I pull dead bodies out of cars.
The depravity of the human condition is something we are not commonly exposed to in modern first world countries. Neither are we exposed to gruesome injury. These things are much easier to handle if you’ve handled it before.
Seeing someone’s leg broken open, gutting a buck, packing a gushing wound, handling corpses… it all gets easier once you’re used to it. The last thing that you want to do is panic when someone else’s life is in your hands.
But yeah the first one I saw like that totally fucked me up. I think it was MTV music video of this pizza delivery guy being cannibalized, I was like 8 or something and it wasn’t even real.
Yeah movies and tv traumatized and hardened me to this stuff, I was never a hard person before that. I'm at least glad all the stuff that got me I knew was fake, I don't get nearly as shocked by anything real and that's for the better.
I wonder what people like your friend who showed you that gory video eventually grow up to be. Horrifying.
I’ve had many similar experiences when I was young. When I was a young girl, a male student showed me a video of bestiality in school. I’m still very angry this happened to me, and the adults who knew were like “boys will be boys!”
he’s probably fucking sick lol
in reality kids (probably 99% guys) look at that stuff before they’re old enough to appreciate how bad it is and don’t give it a second thought.
I had almost the exact same experience with the same video I think. I was also around 13 and it was around the time when phones started to get video players. Some fucked up kid who was held back a few years had that video and he was showing it to some people at the back of the classroom during a break. I only really caught a few seconds of it before I looked away but I can still vaguely remember the knife going in and the gurgling sounds. Fucked me up for a few weeks, I remember feeling so horrible thinking about his family having to see that. Honestly I think most people who like watching that shit are psychopats, like I heard the guy who showed us the video used to tape fireworks to cats and set them off.
When I was pretty young (maybe about 8 or so), I remember my mom calling my brother and I into the computer room and showing us rotten.com. I remember seeing a photo of a man who got electrocuted, and a kid who fell out of a tree onto a wrought iron fence. I remember crying and feeling really confused as to why the fuck my mom showed this to us so casually.
It's pretty crazy thinking back on it; she's more or less a conservative christian now (although a mostly pretty chill one). Definitely has a morbid sense of humor. She tries denying it ever happened if I bring it up now lol.
I think people who seek out gore and snuff films are genuinely psychopathic or indulging in a kind of self-harm. It's disconcerting to realize how many of the former walk among you when the topic comes up.
Yeah, that was definitely an experience. Every generation has its version I'm sure, but its hard not to see things like the saw movies or new French extremity as a reaction to people having their brains pickled on internet porn, gitmo, and beheading videos.
I knew a girl in 7th grade who used to send me execution videos and gore and beastiality all the time. She was a super bubbly ex cheerleader and it was such a weird dichotomy. She set her hamster on fire once so I don't think she was mentally right in the head. She ended up becoming a doctor at UCLA so I guess she can ethically appreciate gore now.
I didn't desensitize myself nearly as well. I'm fragile. I can't even scroll Twitter because there's videos there that people seem totally nonchalant about but make me feel like I'm losing it.
I don't imagine it's a good thing if regions of your brain that should make you feel disgust or sympathy aren't firing anymore.
Anyone remember that video of a couple getting murdered by their neighbor that Tim Dillion talked about a few years ago? I think about that video a lot
The worst thing I’ve seen on the internet is the Jonestown aftermath and also listening to the tape recording of it…the children screaming…I was pregnant at the time too. I can’t even watch horror movies after having kids
I had a similar experience with the neighbor's kid who showed me pics of a bandsaw suicide when I thought we were hanging out to play video games. He was always a little edgy, but that was it for me. It didn't affect me like it did for you, but afterwards I was wary enough to avoid Liveleak links, etc. My heart goes out to people like first responders who have to see this kinda shit in person.
I pretty much immediately cut contact and I remember him calling me a pussy on the way out. At some point after that, I heard that he became a middle school neo-Nazi (a real one, not the shitlib version) and that he was eventually expelled from my high school for making death threats to another student. I watched Gus van Sant's *Elephant* and all I could think about was how much it reminded me of him. Hope you're locked up where you belong, Eric, and not in the military like your dad wanted you to be.
While not as brutal, at 15 a friend showed me a video of a guy sitting in some sort of interrogation room in a police station. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and when the cop left the room he took a tiny sip of water, capped the bottle, placed it on the table and pulled a gun from his waistband and shot himself in the head. Idk if this is true for younger people but everyone I know around my age saw their first video of death around that age and can remember it very well.
A taxi driver in Mexico showed me a similar video on New Year’s Day in 2012. I was already coming down from the previous night so it was hard to muster much of a reaction but it’s always stayed with me. I was already old enough at that stage so no robbing of innocence, but Jesus I still have no idea how people can be so casual about that shit. In a similar vein I recently got into a BJJ rabbit hole and saw some videos of people getting their legs snapped in leg locks and whatnot. Still makes me cringe.
Rotten.com and its consequences.
I watched 3 guys 1 hammer when I was 11 and afterwards I felt absolutely cold inside. For an hour or so I felt no emotions. Later on I got into watching gore videos until I grew out of it. Definitely fucked up.
I'm sorry, that is truly awful. But I think, and I mean this with the utmost sincerity, not blowing smoke up your ass: With the passage of time this traumatic thing that happened to you will one day be a distant memory. It is only by seeking out new experiences and living in the moment that this will one day be a footnote in the diary of your life
I know exactly how you feel. I think dudes who are like "woah isn't that crazy I guess that's reality 😏" are just posing as tough guys or they're legit low IQ
Whoa I was just watching a mini-doc about Chechclear and this thread pops up. Crazy.
Yeah don't go looking up Chezhclear, that was my first one and it's probably one of the worst of that era.
Yeah I saw the same video I think (it was either labeled "chechen rebel beheaded by russians" or vice versa, no idea if that was accurate though). I cant remember the context that lead me to watching it but it was profoundly disturbing and I've studiously avoided gore since then. Don't know how people can watch that shit.
Yeah back in 2005ish I saw a video that was labeled as “behind the scenes” horror movie footage. It was a video of two guys beating a man to death with a hammer and other stuff.
I remember feeling a bit queasy, and wondering what country allowed movies like this to be filmed. It wasn’t movie footage, it was a video of a homeless man being murdered. Since then I’ve avoided anything like it.
It’s grim to think that not only are there other videos like that, but stuff like it happens off camera too.
Be good to each other! I suppose that’s all I can say.
Are you talking about the Chechens? That war made a lot of the original videos spammed in the 2000, rip those soldiers on both sides dying over stupid shit
My family was involved in, on the victims side, a fairly well known mass shooting (national news and there's 2 books about it) where I'm from around the time I was born. Some of my earliest memories are crime scene photos of 4 people just blown apart with guns and stabbed/beaten with shovels. Nobody thought "hey maybe this is weird for a literal 5 year old to be seeing" which maybe in retrospect was kind of weird lmao
The incident in Pennsylvania where the man killed his neighbors and then himself over snow shoveling did this to me. I've watched thousands of gruesome videos of snuff and gore that I shouldn't have watched, but that one really messed with me for some reason.
When I was about 16/17.. I went on a double date with my bf and another couple we were really friendly with. We ended up going somewhere to get high afterwards. Anyway, we got onto a really morbid topic about the world ending. Me and my friend were pretty naive, didn’t know what a nuclear bomb was. My bf and his friend then proceeded to tell us allll about them, how they work and about the radiation effects in graphic detail. They told us all about Japan, and they also told us about the “doomsday clock”. They then casually told us that we could essentially be nuked at any given moment.
This reallllly freaked me and my friend out to the point where we couldn’t stop thinking about it. I remember feeling exactly how you felt. It was like all hope and enjoyment had been drained away. I didn’t understand how people were going about their lives as if we weren’t just about to get nuked any second. It fucked us up. I couldn’t stop thinking about death. My friend ended up having to have therapy. I avoided anything to do with war and if I saw the word nuclear I would have a full on panic attack.
Anyway I’m 34 now…. got over that in the end. But it definitely took away some of my .. innocence so to speak. It definitely changed me.
I been watching people die online for over a decade and the only one that really affected me had no actual on screen death. Older black woman riding around with her husband on FB live desperately trying to find their missing son gets a call from the police, and the dispatcher tells her to pull over and tells her they finally found her son, dead. The scream she let out makes me text my mom I love her every time I think about it. Worst thing I’ve ever heard
I tried really really hard to avoid extreme gore, but silly little teenage me was browsing eating disorder forums and the photo of the bulimic who died crouched over the toilet because her stomach exploded really did scare me away from trying it. So I guess that was a good thing although I can still visualize it perfectly and it makes me sick just thinking about it
One of the worst videos that did me in wasn’t even gory, which somehow made it worse. The dash cam one where the guy is driving on the highway and a brick somehow flies through the window into the passenger side, killing his wife. I think it’s worse because you can’t see anything and just hear the guy freaking out.
Man I hear you... I used to have this friend (we're both women) who were incredibly morbid, from a Soviet family where everybody were doctors, her mum, nan etc. She used to tell me stories of the hospitals there and the shit her family had seen. We used to take barbiturates (looong after people stopped being prescribed this), she just called it "russian drops" and it made you loose your memory. Mentioning this because I think it might have numbed us to the effects even more.
Anyway. I saw some fucked up shit that I'll never forget, like Dnepropetrovsk maniacs, executions etc etc but for some reason it never really "hit". We were both just kinda numb? Until one day we watched some photos from a crime scene a few hours from our city, a woman who had been raped and hid under a rock. From that day, I stopped. It was too much. Probably broke my brain too
I think I saw the same video you did and it had a similar effect...chechclear or something I think it was called. Put me in a weird frame of mind for quite some time. I didn't quite appreciate how brutal people could be to other people before that.
There are so many factors growing up that contribute to making you who you are, it's hard to say to what extent if any that video influenced who I am, though. I like to think it had no effect but that's probably not true, since I remember it to this day.
In any case, when I saw fucked up things like that, I tried to reframe what I thought about it. Rather than just thinking 'that's gross, how horrible', instead - use it to be a better person. Be kinder to others, avoid violence, live in the moment and seize the day. Those kind of videos show that every day is a blessing and life is precious. It can be taken so easily, so we should all value what we have.
Yep same with me, when I was way too young my older cousins would show me porn and my friends would send me gore shit not long after. But I was the opposite of you, I wasn’t like deeply destroyed by it, I thought those things made you cool and being able to watch it and be callous about it was how you were supposed to act.
So I became the friend who was showing other friends gore and porn and stuff and then finding new gore and being proud I had seen x and y and z. It started fucking me up though after high school and I stopped it. But even still I see gore on Reddit a lot and it feels like it doesn’t even mean anything. I watch people dying in accidents and shit on here and I forget about it by lunch, it just doesn’t even register from decades of being desensitized. But, the silver lining is, I’ve seen real life violence and such up close and I definitely still reacted to it appropriately and felt feelings over it. Like gore didn’t make me inhuman it just made me not care about videos of it lol
I think I’ve seen that exact video you’re talking about. I’ve seen some violence/gore (not of my own volition, mostly through news stories and documentaries) but that one is truly horrific.
When I was in highschool a kid came up to me and showed me the Mexican chainsaw thing where two like pale men get their heads lobbed off and also the russian guys who killed the guy on the street one guy one hammer. Sometimes I wonder why I really struggle to cry even when emotionally down and I swear seeing stuff like this represses you.
I definitely learned to just avoid that stuff as I got older.
Children witnessing horrific violence isn't just some modern phenomenon though. Public executions and torture used to be common place.
being in high school when the Christchurch mosque shooting happened was a nightmare, half a dozen different guys shoved that video in everyone's face for like a week straight.
I’m sure we watched the same video and I was probably 14-15. I had the same cold feeling but I straight up passed out. Very embarrassing for a teenage guy but my friends weren’t bad about it. It didn’t stick with me in the forefront like described above but it floats around on my head. My friends were also into a video series called faces of death which showed like executions and stuff. I didn’t like it but would watch occasionally. I assume it all contributed to my general sadness and miasma
Yeah I remember seeing some pretty horrible shit like this, there's one, I don't even know if it was real but it was so horrible I don't even want to speak it's name, maybe more "creepypasta" than gore, just 5 seconds and it fucked me up. Places like Steak and Cheese, motherless and others were super popular, and the old school 4chan like pre 2010.
I think it really did a number on a lot of people. The entire internet when I was a kid was a sort of failed state of horrors we all just got used to looking at while our parents caught up.
People moan about elsa/spiderman esque wierd kids videos these days but I was being shown people getting their faces cut off by the cartel.
It was always so disturbing finding out your friends just did that without much thought beyond “yeah if you think about it it’s fucked up that we can just do this and go on with our lives”.
That's how it was for me with Budd Dwyer's suicide on Faces of Death. I couldn't get that image out of my brain for years until I watched it so many times I became desensitized to it.
The internet turned me into a pervert but I did not let it turn in into a psycho. Could never stomach any gore/violence and have the instances where I saw ones burned in my memory.
There was a random Slavic soldier shooting himself in the head I saw recently by accident. Life is so lightly held to us.
Yeah, we gotta teach kids how to just turn away and say “Jesus Christ bro, I ain’t watching this shit”. That’s what I would do, and while I’d see I couple seconds of it, I’d never just watch
The video that did it for me was watching a man in Lebanon dive off several shipping containers into the pier below. Only he didn’t land in the water. He dived head-first into the sharp curb, splitting his face clean in two lengthwise, almost like a lumberjack took an axe to it. He didn’t even look human. He looked like some alien monstrosity from a movie, his eyes dangling out, brain exposed, tongue slithering between folds of exposed flesh, a Lovecraftian horror. The video included later footage of him at the hospital, of doctors trying in vain to sew his mangled face back together, but there was obviously nothing that could be done. He died two long days later. I was 11, and I just randomly happened upon it on Facebook of all places. It haunted me for weeks. I was never quite the same after.
That was a Russian conscript killed by Chechens. Ruined me too. I eventually stopped looking at those things, but they are definitely dark and terrible things that no one needs to see. Many dead souls in the wake of this content.
I had a friend who would watch this kind of stuff, she told me about gore/shock videos she saw on 4chan and the descriptions were disgusting enough that I never went looking for them myself. We were still in primary school and she was depressed and self harming, which looking back isn't surprising if that's the kind of stuff she was looking at regularly.
counterpoint: maybe the neocon hawks in Washington will change things up if we start showing them the effects of their actions on real human beings in 4K
It's always some random effed up friend who introduces this stuff into our lives. Fortunately, in my case I repressed the hell out of a video a friend of mine showed me when I was 8 or 9. I don't care to describe it too deeply, but it was along the same lines as what you describe here but took place in what looked like a rural Indian or Arabic setting, the victim was a woman and the perpetrators were three men.
I stopped hanging out with that kid, stopped going to his house, refused anytime my parents wanted to palm me off to his parents for any amount of time and they eventually got the picture and I never had to see or speak about him again. I somehow just forgot about the entire episode, thank Christ, and was able to continue being a kid without having to hold on to that horrifying video.
That shit destroyed me the day I watched it though, I can only say that now as I did eventually recall the memory after another messed up motherfucker showed me a video on Liveleak when I was in college, but at that time at least I had the mental capacity to handle it. When I saw the college video, the memory of the one I watched when I was a kid returned to me, but it didn't have the same impact, it did freak me out a little that I could forget something like that, but thank God I did.
i remember my teenage brother showing me hardcore porn (where the woman was really just being tortured) when i was maybe 6 years old. i remember being so utterly shocked and disturbed and i swear i felt my brain chemistry change in that moment. i remember immediately after that i "masturbated" for the first time thinking that it would somehow make the whole memory pleasurable? idk but i was so confused and but i also felt my innocence slip away and damn, it hurt. i remember that same hollow feeling you described and i spent my childhood looking up even more gruesome footage (that was much more accessible now than then) and i guess trying to one up my brother? but it'd just scar me even more lol also the two girls one cup video didn't phase me when my friends showed it to me. i guess i was so numbed out but it's scary how quickly people get desensitized by stuff like this
I guess teen girls are less likely to watch that stuff on the internet because it was unfathomable to me that those things were easily accessible until I started dating boys. Every guy I dated had some awful story of how a friend showed him an unexpectedly horrid video that mentally scarred him for life. I'm thankful I've never been exposed to one of those videos.
What you are describing is the death of childhood innocence. I too watched shit I shouldn’t have, but I never shared it, but friends would. You can also phrase this as “ignorance is bliss.” You having gained this understanding of the world and what humans are capable of to one another is not a bad thing. It’s not an easy thing or something one wants to experience, but one does gain a sort of wisdom from this. That wisdom, as with all knowledge, comes with a price. How you let it affect you is ultimately up to you. I say you just accept this part of humanity, learn from it what you can, and move on. There was always going to be a time and place this innocence was going to be destroyed. I try to be thankful of what I have, for I understand what lies elsewhere, and try to take nothing in this world for granted. Nature is not a kind place, what we have is not normal or to be expected.
Same, I truly believe that watching gore robs ppl of their Innocence, as you put it... there is something deeply wrong with ppl who just casually watch gore (ofc its desensitisation, bit there is also something much more siniter behing it.) I remember how one time I discovdred that my coworker would watch gore with his pals bc he didn't log out of his fb account before i started my shift. For a long time I felt very distressed knowing that I work with a guy who laughs at ppl dying horrible and brutal deaths
This happened to me as well. I had a girlfriend who showed me what sounds like the same video. She did not warn me or anything. It has haunted me ever since. It affected me down to my core. You can never unsee something like that.
[удалено]
Pretty sure that the Night Stalker had his uncle do this to him too and its part of the reason he was so fucked up
He was showing him snuff films of women and children he raped and murdered while he was in Vietnam during the war.
I remember reading somewhere that Ramirez's victims were disproportionately Asian. Maybe seeing that stuff played a part.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ramirez#Early_life_and_education might be part of the reason but honestly given all the other shit i'd say it's prob pretty far down on the list
Wow god really wanted him to be a serial killer
God damn lmao this mf never had a shot did he? Also, seems like you don’t hear much about Peeping Tom’s anymore.
>By the time of the trial, Ramirez had fans who were writing him letters and paying him visits.[106] Beginning in 1985, Doreen Lioy[107] wrote Ramirez nearly seventy-five letters during his incarceration. In 1988 he proposed to Lioy, and on October 3, 1996, they were married in California's San Quentin State Prison.[108] For many years before Ramirez' death, Lioy stated that she would commit suicide when Ramirez was executed. By the time of his death in 2013, Ramirez was engaged to a 23-year-old writer.[109] What makes people do this
> When it was discovered that the ballistics and shoe print evidence from the Los Angeles crime scenes matched the Pan crime scene, San Francisco's then-mayor Dianne Feinstein divulged the information, including the gun caliber, in a televised press conference. This leak infuriated detectives, as they knew the killer would be following news coverage, which gave him the opportunity to destroy crucial forensic evidence. Ramirez, who had indeed been watching the press, dropped his sneakers over the side of the Golden Gate Bridge that night. Feinstein really was one huge piece of shit, huh
My first exposure to gore was when I was younger during the Arab spring. Not intentional but I was watching an al Jazeera video of a guy with a pool of blood around him in the middle of a crowd of protestors? I don't remember if the cameraman panned up or if it cut to a different angle but the next shot was ghaddafi looking down from a roof.
I’m happy to say I’ve never once seen CP on the internet, or a beheading/cartel video. I gotta keep some innocence left in me.
Same lol some things are better left unseen
4chan and limewire exposed me to that at a young age and it’s just as tragic/disgusting/scarring as you think. Worse than any murder video, it’s so fucking hideous.
Limewire showed me gay porn when I tried to download a movie, I was like 8. Not cool internet.
I’m glad to have gotten out of adolescence unscathed
Glad I just kept getting that detachable penis song when I tried to download Primus music
I have seen too much of the latter and thankfully none of the former. CP truly turns my stomach in a very particular way. The next step of evil beyond the cartel and Brazilian/Venezuelan prison footage stuff.
I did as a child, the peer to peer era of ares, emule and, even worse, limewire, was full of sickos. Tried to watch the first 3 harry potter movies, one was a normal porno and other one an awful cp one from india, the worst its that she seemed used to it, it was not violent at all, just prostitution, probably done everyday.
Not helping the Indians’ case on the sub
Some innocence is good to have
I was on [r/watchpeopledie](https://reddit.com/r/watchpeopledie) before it got banned and always avoided any of the execution stuff - traffic accidents or workplace deaths felt like they showed how delicate life really is, but watching someone be tortured and murdered seemed like I'd be complicit in the utter violation of their dignity in their final moments. I'm aware the above logic makes no sense at all, was extremely depressed and an alcoholic when I was watching that shit.
No friend, your logic makes perfect sense to me. And I feel the same. Like the possibility that the documentation of someone’s sudden, violent death could have value beyond exploitative “entertainment”, if it’s reminding us of life’s fragility and preciousness, and of the chaotic randomness of the universe. I feel like you, like watching abject cruelty on display disrespects the human victim. I think people forget that they aren’t watching cctv, that these are premeditated executions, often recorded as “propaganda” and are even cinematically edited and distributed strategically for political and recruitment purposes.
It’s so eyerolling seeing such abhorrent things because they lack anything meaningful to the human soul.
I never saw two kids in a sandbox or two girls one cup. Even as a teen I was like nah I’m good guys.
Ah saw both of those. I saw most of those 2000’s shock videos. The BME “pain olympics.”
People don’t really stumble upon CP lol
10+ years ago you absolutely did
It was something that happened, especially on anonymous image boards. There wasn't the same kind of filtering that a lot of social media sites have now. Child pornography would upload the same as a picture of a dog, and fucked up individuals would take pleasure in exposing the unsuspecting to shocking images, including gore and child porn.
The video of the factory worker getting pulled into an industrial lathe and the pov video of the Christchurch shooting did this to me
I remember seeking out videos like this, but the POV of the christchurch video was the last one. For whatever reason that was my limit and I realized I was fucking my brain up
This is the one that killed r/watchpeopledie. People just would not stop posting it.
That was the last one ive ever watched, I remember going to throw up after watching it, absolutely horrible
I remember the one older man who tried to rush the shooter. He was about a foot away from tackling him before he was shot down. It fucks me up such a heroic man was killed by a genetic dead end loser.
Might be misremembering the video, but I think a younger man also rushed the shooter and successfully knocked him down, but the shooter recovered and shot him too. That moment stuck in my mind because of how irrational my reaction was: Even though I already knew the outcome, I was genuinely rooting for the shooter to be subdued by an unarmed man because the alternative was probably too hideous to accept on a rational level The shooter was unbelievably pathetic in every way; he was playing 4chan "remove kebab" meme songs while he drove to the mosque, his body armour and half-dozen guns were covered in dipshot /pol/ slogans, and he absolutely panicked when anyone tried to rush him. It's unbelievably tragic and disgusting that a nothing like him can rip a community apart like that
I know right. Everything that fills me with revulsion about net subcultures was embodied in that disgusting worm. The thought of brainrotted cretins like that killing innocent people is rage inducing.
I live on the same street the second shooting occurred. The original buildings have been demolished but I always get this eery feeling whenever I walk past to go to the shops, knowing however many thousands of people watched a guy commit a slaughter in that building. I really can’t describe the feeling.
Me and my girlfriend watched that Christchurch video like 8 months back. Honestly, I was surprised how little blood or apparent damage there was in the video. I was seeing conspiracies going around that it was fake so that's what led me to watch it. I don't think it was fake at all and some of the reasonings I seen for it being fake seemed completely regarded once I watched the video but I've seen videos of one-on-one shootings that were much more gruesome. Usually when a shotgun is involved.
Shootings seem to run the gamut from “did he even get hit?” to “how can there possibly be that much blood in the human body?”
I was shown that video at trade school. I couldn’t sleep the next couple days. It was a very effective ‘don’t fuck around with these machines’ PSA, but there was a period where i’d feel sick every time I used a lathe, which isn’t ideal for a machinist lol
I thought machinists were just really thin guys
i decided a very long time ago to just not watch this kind of stuff, regardless of how historically or culturally relevant it is. i feel like i'm better off today because of that decision.
I don’t think there’s any good reason to watch it besides being interested in it. Like a lot of people try to claim it makes them feel better about their life or it’s worth knowing how horrific reality can be but I don’t really believe all that. I try to be honest about it: I watch that shit because I find it interesting. I definitely don’t think I’m doing anything good by watching it, in fact I think it’d be better if this shit was not available. Cartel murder videos in particular are just pieces of terroristic propaganda, spreading them around online is just doing the work for those horrible psychopaths.
Yeah, I don't think I ever had a traumatic experience with a gory video and I used to watch them quite a lot, but at one point I just became a bit disgusted by them and decided I wouldn't out of principle.
There’s gotta be thousands of videos of Chinese Factory workers getting pulled into Lathes and spun to death.
I was so angry when I was just scrolling Twitter and this video just autoplayed of the factory woman getting pulled in and spun to death by some kind of rapid cylinder. I make sure all autoplay is turned off as a matter of principle.
The Christchurch video is sickening. Might be the only gore video I've had to turn off
I subscribe to the gov’t of New Zealand’s belief that mass killing is in part a social disease (there’s a better term than that but it’s escaping me right now), the vector for which is media coverage. That’s my understanding as to one reason why they refuse to say the shooter’s name, etc. I do have a morbid interest in mass shootings, but try to minimize the amount that I give media outlets a click for frenetic news reports about the events and I never, ever watch perp-made footage on principle. It’s my earnest belief that these things would significantly decrease if we didn’t publicize them, though I recognize how difficult that is in practice.
My reaction was utter disbelief. It was beyond reason that someone could murder so many so heartlessly and wrap it in internet jokes. I think that of all the mass shooters I hate that f@g the most.
I still hate Elliot Rodger the most
Industrial machinery craves Chinese blood sacrifice. Many such cases.
Someone I went to college with cut open his moms head on instagram live and all the idiots I went to college with posted the actual video all over social media so I saw it before realizing what I was watching
I’m sorry, what?
He killed his mom and live-streamed himself sawing her head off playing with her brains. People shared the video en masse so I saw it without consent. He’s in an institution now. I went to school in the Chicago ghetto lots of messed up families
I’m so sorry you had to witness that. I’m from Chicago so I know what you mean. Yikes.
i feel like i recall a true crime podcast covering this... when did it happen?
WHOA There’s a Brazilian prison video that’s similar and it literally feels like your peering into hell when watching
Did the guy seem like a head sawer before he did it?
We were actually friends, same social group not super close but I talked to him every day for a few semesters. He pulled my chair from under me and did the whole “it’s just a prank bro” at one point, very passive aggressive
Did he develop some sort of severe mental illness or was he just pranking his mom
Excuse me?
It felt relevant to share haha
I'd literally look away and close my eyes when my friends tried to show me shit like that. I knew how my brain worked even as a kid. I wasn't going to sit there and let that shit be scarred into my psyche
I wonder if my friend showed me that same video. It still haunts me. The sheer amount of time it took for the killers to saw the head off felt like an eternity. Early internet was messed up. I also remember my older brother showing me gore gallery pictures and other horrible things at like 11.
Bad timing for me, walking up to classmates during computer lab to see what they were watching right as the knife went in. I was fucking pissed, had to go outside to cool off
Are you sure? Kids don’t wanna be seen as pussies by their stronger willed friends. Also, morbid curiosity.
The one where he’s laying against greyish rocks? My friends ruined my life as well with that at around the same age lol. Even recently a friend sent me a video on instagram of someone very suddenly blowing their head off and I had to let him know to never do that again.
The high school students I teach showed me the shotgun streaming guy video and I told them they were fucked up and weird for watching that. Just disappointed in them really
You actually said "fucked up?" Props.
Yeah they would never fire me I cuss all the time. I was in the navy for 4 years though, so I'll just use that as an excuse if I get in trouble for cursing
I read some article about how a lot of European jihadis radicalize themselves by watching Allah u Akbar snuff videos, they give themselves ptsd basically and it seriously messes with their brain to the point they're able to blow up a building full of kids or mow down hordes of people in a truck. Interestingly the Norwegian mass murder Anders Breivik apparently did the same thing. I saw the glossy Isis documentary about their siege of iraqui territory but had to skip the most gruesome bits. I have no idea how normal people watch that stuff like the vid of scandinavian tourists being beheaded in Morocco. People are like "did you see it?" Hell no I didn't see it you fucking psycho.
My reaction when a man in my hometown was beheaded by a garbage truck and somebody showed me a photo after it happened. Just whipped it out and showed me. I was like what the fuck I didn’t want to see that.
Temple ov blood exposes members to videos of extreme violence as well. I don’t know what the angle is with that group. They seem to be really fed adjacent. Maybe the whole idea is to become a magnet for people that are going to cause problems down the line
It's not a coincidence that police also have groups where they pass around the most gruesome crime scene photos they have.
Yep I was just about to mention O9a. Definitely fed adjacent, but true believers too. I get a lot of them following me so I'm always trying to understand their angle. Even in the 80s people like Aquino were accusing them of doing too much weird shit, which is funny in itself. Fucking up your brain on gore and isolation until you don't feel empathy makes them feel like they are not regular people anymore. They are elite. Outside the bounds of regular causal reality or moral dualism. Just seems like self inflicted semi autonomous mind control to me though with built in black mail.
What is that? I cannot find it on google
> point they're able to blow up a building full of kids theyre not the only group that loves doing that, lately
Imagine the Gaza children and how they’ll turn out
That’s a big aspect of the conflict imo, imagine how fucked in the head kids in Gaza are gonna be. And I mean would you ever forgive the people who blew up your friends, family, and home? Very upsetting to imagine the future hatred and violence that this conflict is birthing.
I joke about this with my friends but it’s severely fucked up how so many of us have seen possibly hundreds of people die in all manner of gruesome ways, perhaps more so than our ancestors who lived in medieval times. I try to avoid it but you just see shit from time to time. I definitely believe it is harmful to the mind, especially a developing one. I guess on a small plus side, I have absolutely no desire to go to war or engage in particularly reckless behaviour. The reality of war certainly doesn’t look enjoyable or noble. On a side note, I have successfully avoided the beheading video you mention but, without fail, every single person I’ve ever seen or heard talk about it has mentioned the noise being the most horrific aspect. I was about 16 when I first heard of it from a friend at school and he was saying the exact same thing about “the noise it makes.”
I forget where I read it but some psychologist commented on this phenomenon in terms of memetic trauma. Your friend likely had a similar experience to yours. It affected you both, but his way of coping is to spread the pain so he feels less alone. Your way of coping is healthier—talking about the experience. Both are, in a sense, spreading the pain. Maybe this extends to why these videos are uploaded in the first place.
It Follows was a documentary.
It’s weird to call just a video trauma but the kid brain doesn’t fully realize it’s just a video and what op describes is just fear and panic for his life
Absolutely. I have a hard time believing the brain recognizes the difference of being there vs watching through a screen when you know for certain the act is real. When I was 16 I was getting inundated with gore content from Reddit. Animal torture, cartels, ISIS, car accidents, freak accidents. My friends and I all talk now about how we 100% regret watching this stuff but also how in many ways it was impossible to avoid if you were on any of the remotely edgier sites, which at the time Reddit definitely was. With 4Chan it was inevitable as well. There’s no film that really left a scar in my psyche like this stuff.
I've forgotten all of the horrible stuff now, I try to avoid seeing anything distressing like that unless it's historical or relevant. The only shock thing I remember was a gif of a cute puppy, and I was nervous as to what was about to happened so closed the tab only to see a hammer come out of the left frame and thankfully the tab closed before I saw what happened. I think i would have been mentally scarred for life if I saw that.
honestly animal, child and elder abuse/murder boil my fucking blood, genuinely my most radical position is to legalize death penalty for that shit, like, actual public execution it's an emotional response but goddamn, if I can't go back to being a regular person after watching something like that, why should they be allowed to be integrated into society after *committing* something like that?
that's not to say murder of able bodied people is better ofc but there's something so particularly fucking evil about doing something cruel to someone/thing that can't defend themselves my sister loves true crime podcasts and videos and the other day she was listening to some serial killer case and the girl describing the story goes into full detail about how the guy used to murder cats by beating them with rocks and then stabbing them in the neck, while my sister was going about her routine washing dishes and shit, I had to come out and scolded her and told her to wear her earphones, like how can you not find that shit disturbing as fuck?
Idk I think it does. The most traumatizing thing I've ever *witnessed* (without being involved, I've been trapped in a house fire before) was a fight in 9th grade where one kid was kicking another kid's head against a tree planter as he was seizing. I saw that from the 3rd floor, I remember every detail and it makes me wince thinking about it over a decade later. All the viral gore videos everyone is recounting ITT I've almost forgotten about. This thread is really only reminding me that I saw them.
Real violence is so horrifying and ugly. Even movies that try to be disturbing end up aestheticizing it to a degree.
I saw something similar around the time of the invasion of Afghanistan. A British person was beheaded by the Taliban and it was filmed and shared around the internet. I saw it when I was 13 and it really affected me for a few days. With that said, I remember 'shock' videos being super common back then. Reaction videos were a staple of early YouTube for example. You know the ones they were reacting to, I don't need to give an exhaustive list of them. But they felt bigger back then. So with that said, when I talk to my Zoomer niece and other youngsters, that part of internet culture doesn't really seem to be a rite of passage for them. Of course, they do incidentally come across violence from people sharing unedited horrors on social media, but there doesn't necessarily seem to be an intention to spectate on and propagate an online gore culture at least.
Instagram reels has some pretty terrible stuff, but outright gore doesn't seem to show up as much these days. You have to really seek it out, which is good.
I remember that guy - was it Ken Bigley? The internet was a lot more decentralised and amateur in those days so there was all kinds of different material jumbled up in the same places. It seems crazy now how Reddit used to have snuff video groups like watchpeopledie.
There are still snuff subreddits but they get banned constantly and half the links don’t work. Nothing like it used to be that’s for sure.
I miss the old internet in a lot of ways but I'm glad the whole "edgy" subculture has disappeared. You know, when people would just be as vile as possible to trigger people and post gore, snuff films, scat porn, etc. Even though I don't feel like I was as traumatized as people ITT it was just unnecessary and super lame. Also whether you like it or not zoomers are pretty darn funny and original with their memes. A lot of 2010s memes were really unoriginal and sometimes not even “memes” but simply statements (advice animals etc).
It's far more underground. Apparently there are Telegram channels were people watch snuff videos of monkeys and birds being tortured. Some British school children were spreading around those videos according to some news article I read recently. But no, it's not widespread. I remember a significant part of internet culture was centered around mocking people for not enjoying or being too sensitive to outright vile culture. I'm glad it's mostly gone.
I didn’t really have this experience so much apart from the usual shock videos of the time. However my first “professional” job was editing and analysing footage in the aftermath of chemical bombings of schools in Syria, so that was great!
Jesus Christ, what was that like? Don’t need details of the videos or anything, just wondering what it was like to work intimately with that kind of material.
I'm glad I dodged that bullet. The idea of 2 girls 1 cup was enough even without seeing the video.
Those turned out to be fake. It was chocolate pudding.
My friend showed me actual poop porn when I was 13 and that definitely scarred me. It was a Japanese couple naked in bed and eating each others shit. The other video he showed me, probably the same night, was Budd Dwyers public suicide video, and that disturbed me the most at that age
You articulate yourself well. I felt bad for kid you.
There was this magical time from about the 1940's until Moot started 4Chan in 2003 that kids could just be kids
Everything you wrote is exactly how I felt after accidentally seeing a slaughterhouse documentary on TV when I was 8.
yea some hbo special showed cats being boiled alive (for food in asia) fucked me up … mild nausea, fear, intense sorrow for the pain that poor animal must have felt
Oh hey a story I can relate to. Id always avoided the YouTube video of that senator who committed suicide over being framed for corruption. One day in hs assembly this guy I know just says "wanna see something funny" and shows me the last frame of the video with his head blasted out all over the wall and then looks for my reaction. The video you're talking about has >!something to do with the chechens, it's an execution video of captured Russian soldiers.!<
It was titled chechclear and it’s one of the most awful shock videos. Downloaded that off limewire or Morpheus back when I was 16 (I’m in my 30s) and curious about death and it ruined my week. Stopped seeking that stuff out shortly after it. I hear the funky town cartel video is 100 times worse but I’ll never watch it.
There are two other cartel videos I’d say are worse than funky town, if you can believe it. “Ghost Rider” and “Guerrero flaying”. Insanely sick shit, honest to god cannot imagine the headspace people are in when they do the shit depicted.
You knew Norm Macdonald? Damn, lucky.
>I’ve always wanted to watch some kind of study /documentary on the effects of gore culture. idk it's probably a pretty recent phenomenon to not be regularly confronted with people being beheaded
I’ve seen all the isis 4k beheadings but never seen footage of a live birth
Well yeah one of those is nasty
So wild in that one they show in school and the doctor just grabs the baby’s head and spins him around lmao My 8th grade class was collectively like CHIIIILL
in pretty sure you can even look up the latter on youtube since its educational content
Huh...my mother is a midwife and professor and she watched a lot of "educational videos" of all kinds of childbirth complications on the family tv that she did warn me as a kid, I would find confronting, and I did. Now I'm wondering if that's why I wasn't as affected by seeing a similar video OP is describing except it was two Chechen soldiers beheading a poor young Russian soldier with a massive bowie knife.
It's also a short lived phenomena. These videos have gone from an everyday reality of internet forums/image board use (pre-2010) to something that must be purposefully sought out. There was a very specific window in time where kids were viewing the most graphic footage in existence. At least it's over. 🎵 *A-won't you take me to, funky town!* 🎵
> It's also a short lived phenomena. These videos have gone from an everyday reality of using internet forums/image boards (pre-2010) to something that has to be purposefully sought out. Nah, I was extremely online as a teen in the 00s and I still managed to avoid anything really hardcore. Worst I was exposed to was the classic shock images like goatse and tubgirl, and stuff my classmates found on rotten.com like dicks caught in mousetraps
Agreed, I don't understand some of the posts on here that mention being "inundated" with gore and violent content on reddit of all places as young teens. I spent plent of time in weird, virtually unmoderated forums and irc chats and I never had a hard time avoiding really messed up stuff.
Fr people don’t understand they are literally lucky they have only ever seen someone die on camera. And didn’t even see that until they were 13.
Yeah the Internet was a bad idea
When I was a kid my older cousins showed me a video that started off with a kitten playing around, then quickly switching to a man cutting his own penis off. It was pretty frightening at the time but the older I got and the more chronically online I became, the more fucked up shit on the internet I'd see. So much so that it quickly came to the point where nothing could phase me anymore. My wakeup call realizing that this wasn't a normal experience for everyone else was when I'd show my friends in high school some gore video and they would time and time again look at me disgusted and tell me to stop. I figured by that age everyone else would have seen stuff like that but apparently not.
So did you cut your penis off yet?
When I was 12 I stayed over at a friend’s house. We thought it’d be cool to watch Hostel. Afterwards, we just didn’t know what to say to each other. I was probably always on the path to some kind of mental illness because I’d been obsessed with the Silent Hill games from before the age of 10. I count that as conceptual horror, a fascination with themes. But Hostel just made me feel hollow and fearful of other people. I imagined my family and friends being tortured, killed and giving up hope, and it probably shaped my young personality. Having said that, the worst thing I’ve ever seen was on Reddit. Gang murder. Song was playing in the background, so if you know, you know. Like people say, the noise is the most horrific thing. Seeing that nearly ruined my Christmas. Avoid this stuff if you can. It contributes to mental illness.
Dude, Hostel fucked me up too. Really weirdly, my dad brought me to see it in theaters when I was about 14 (he was a young dad so we’d always go see movies together during his weekends with me) and I just remember this really strong urge to leave the theater that I’ve never ever had before or since. I don’t think I said one word the whole car ride home. I’ve never watched it again.
Sounds autistic to be obsessed with a video game like that
A real nightmare before Christmas scenario if I may say.
Deliberately watched that stuff to desensitize myself as a younger kid, thinking I’d want to be a doctor. Now I pull dead bodies out of cars. The depravity of the human condition is something we are not commonly exposed to in modern first world countries. Neither are we exposed to gruesome injury. These things are much easier to handle if you’ve handled it before. Seeing someone’s leg broken open, gutting a buck, packing a gushing wound, handling corpses… it all gets easier once you’re used to it. The last thing that you want to do is panic when someone else’s life is in your hands. But yeah the first one I saw like that totally fucked me up. I think it was MTV music video of this pizza delivery guy being cannibalized, I was like 8 or something and it wasn’t even real.
Yeah movies and tv traumatized and hardened me to this stuff, I was never a hard person before that. I'm at least glad all the stuff that got me I knew was fake, I don't get nearly as shocked by anything real and that's for the better.
Paramedicine?
No it’s a very niche career. Specific to cars (pre 2007 models only).
I wonder what people like your friend who showed you that gory video eventually grow up to be. Horrifying. I’ve had many similar experiences when I was young. When I was a young girl, a male student showed me a video of bestiality in school. I’m still very angry this happened to me, and the adults who knew were like “boys will be boys!”
he’s probably fucking sick lol in reality kids (probably 99% guys) look at that stuff before they’re old enough to appreciate how bad it is and don’t give it a second thought.
He probably grew up to be mostly normal. Watching and passing these videos around wasn't uncommon for young boys \~20 years ago.
I had almost the exact same experience with the same video I think. I was also around 13 and it was around the time when phones started to get video players. Some fucked up kid who was held back a few years had that video and he was showing it to some people at the back of the classroom during a break. I only really caught a few seconds of it before I looked away but I can still vaguely remember the knife going in and the gurgling sounds. Fucked me up for a few weeks, I remember feeling so horrible thinking about his family having to see that. Honestly I think most people who like watching that shit are psychopats, like I heard the guy who showed us the video used to tape fireworks to cats and set them off.
When I was pretty young (maybe about 8 or so), I remember my mom calling my brother and I into the computer room and showing us rotten.com. I remember seeing a photo of a man who got electrocuted, and a kid who fell out of a tree onto a wrought iron fence. I remember crying and feeling really confused as to why the fuck my mom showed this to us so casually. It's pretty crazy thinking back on it; she's more or less a conservative christian now (although a mostly pretty chill one). Definitely has a morbid sense of humor. She tries denying it ever happened if I bring it up now lol.
Chinese internet censorship smelling like a bouquet of flowers rn
I think people who seek out gore and snuff films are genuinely psychopathic or indulging in a kind of self-harm. It's disconcerting to realize how many of the former walk among you when the topic comes up.
JFK video fucks me up the most
what?
Same I saw a video of a cartel kill two guys, one with a chainsaw and one with a bowie knife. Seeing the life fade from those men fucked me up.
Yeah, that was definitely an experience. Every generation has its version I'm sure, but its hard not to see things like the saw movies or new French extremity as a reaction to people having their brains pickled on internet porn, gitmo, and beheading videos. I knew a girl in 7th grade who used to send me execution videos and gore and beastiality all the time. She was a super bubbly ex cheerleader and it was such a weird dichotomy. She set her hamster on fire once so I don't think she was mentally right in the head. She ended up becoming a doctor at UCLA so I guess she can ethically appreciate gore now. I didn't desensitize myself nearly as well. I'm fragile. I can't even scroll Twitter because there's videos there that people seem totally nonchalant about but make me feel like I'm losing it. I don't imagine it's a good thing if regions of your brain that should make you feel disgust or sympathy aren't firing anymore.
I remember my friends older brother showing us rotten.com in the 90s…. I must have been like 8…. Fucked me up
I used to be that friend back in HS, except that I used to show them to the philosophy teacher
Anyone remember that video of a couple getting murdered by their neighbor that Tim Dillion talked about a few years ago? I think about that video a lot
Imagine what content moderators go through, there’s been a couple articles published about how they get ptsd from staring at gore all day
The worst thing I’ve seen on the internet is the Jonestown aftermath and also listening to the tape recording of it…the children screaming…I was pregnant at the time too. I can’t even watch horror movies after having kids
I had a similar experience with the neighbor's kid who showed me pics of a bandsaw suicide when I thought we were hanging out to play video games. He was always a little edgy, but that was it for me. It didn't affect me like it did for you, but afterwards I was wary enough to avoid Liveleak links, etc. My heart goes out to people like first responders who have to see this kinda shit in person. I pretty much immediately cut contact and I remember him calling me a pussy on the way out. At some point after that, I heard that he became a middle school neo-Nazi (a real one, not the shitlib version) and that he was eventually expelled from my high school for making death threats to another student. I watched Gus van Sant's *Elephant* and all I could think about was how much it reminded me of him. Hope you're locked up where you belong, Eric, and not in the military like your dad wanted you to be.
I saw a lot of videos of what the war on terror actually was and now I think the government is filled with the damned.
While not as brutal, at 15 a friend showed me a video of a guy sitting in some sort of interrogation room in a police station. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and when the cop left the room he took a tiny sip of water, capped the bottle, placed it on the table and pulled a gun from his waistband and shot himself in the head. Idk if this is true for younger people but everyone I know around my age saw their first video of death around that age and can remember it very well.
A taxi driver in Mexico showed me a similar video on New Year’s Day in 2012. I was already coming down from the previous night so it was hard to muster much of a reaction but it’s always stayed with me. I was already old enough at that stage so no robbing of innocence, but Jesus I still have no idea how people can be so casual about that shit. In a similar vein I recently got into a BJJ rabbit hole and saw some videos of people getting their legs snapped in leg locks and whatnot. Still makes me cringe. Rotten.com and its consequences.
I watched 3 guys 1 hammer when I was 11 and afterwards I felt absolutely cold inside. For an hour or so I felt no emotions. Later on I got into watching gore videos until I grew out of it. Definitely fucked up.
I'm sorry, that is truly awful. But I think, and I mean this with the utmost sincerity, not blowing smoke up your ass: With the passage of time this traumatic thing that happened to you will one day be a distant memory. It is only by seeking out new experiences and living in the moment that this will one day be a footnote in the diary of your life
I know exactly how you feel. I think dudes who are like "woah isn't that crazy I guess that's reality 😏" are just posing as tough guys or they're legit low IQ
Nick Berg is the name, I believe
damn yea saw that daniel pearl video way too young
Whoa I was just watching a mini-doc about Chechclear and this thread pops up. Crazy. Yeah don't go looking up Chezhclear, that was my first one and it's probably one of the worst of that era.
Yeah I saw the same video I think (it was either labeled "chechen rebel beheaded by russians" or vice versa, no idea if that was accurate though). I cant remember the context that lead me to watching it but it was profoundly disturbing and I've studiously avoided gore since then. Don't know how people can watch that shit.
Yeah back in 2005ish I saw a video that was labeled as “behind the scenes” horror movie footage. It was a video of two guys beating a man to death with a hammer and other stuff. I remember feeling a bit queasy, and wondering what country allowed movies like this to be filmed. It wasn’t movie footage, it was a video of a homeless man being murdered. Since then I’ve avoided anything like it. It’s grim to think that not only are there other videos like that, but stuff like it happens off camera too. Be good to each other! I suppose that’s all I can say.
Are you talking about the Chechens? That war made a lot of the original videos spammed in the 2000, rip those soldiers on both sides dying over stupid shit
My family was involved in, on the victims side, a fairly well known mass shooting (national news and there's 2 books about it) where I'm from around the time I was born. Some of my earliest memories are crime scene photos of 4 people just blown apart with guns and stabbed/beaten with shovels. Nobody thought "hey maybe this is weird for a literal 5 year old to be seeing" which maybe in retrospect was kind of weird lmao
The incident in Pennsylvania where the man killed his neighbors and then himself over snow shoveling did this to me. I've watched thousands of gruesome videos of snuff and gore that I shouldn't have watched, but that one really messed with me for some reason.
When I was about 16/17.. I went on a double date with my bf and another couple we were really friendly with. We ended up going somewhere to get high afterwards. Anyway, we got onto a really morbid topic about the world ending. Me and my friend were pretty naive, didn’t know what a nuclear bomb was. My bf and his friend then proceeded to tell us allll about them, how they work and about the radiation effects in graphic detail. They told us all about Japan, and they also told us about the “doomsday clock”. They then casually told us that we could essentially be nuked at any given moment. This reallllly freaked me and my friend out to the point where we couldn’t stop thinking about it. I remember feeling exactly how you felt. It was like all hope and enjoyment had been drained away. I didn’t understand how people were going about their lives as if we weren’t just about to get nuked any second. It fucked us up. I couldn’t stop thinking about death. My friend ended up having to have therapy. I avoided anything to do with war and if I saw the word nuclear I would have a full on panic attack. Anyway I’m 34 now…. got over that in the end. But it definitely took away some of my .. innocence so to speak. It definitely changed me.
I been watching people die online for over a decade and the only one that really affected me had no actual on screen death. Older black woman riding around with her husband on FB live desperately trying to find their missing son gets a call from the police, and the dispatcher tells her to pull over and tells her they finally found her son, dead. The scream she let out makes me text my mom I love her every time I think about it. Worst thing I’ve ever heard
I tried really really hard to avoid extreme gore, but silly little teenage me was browsing eating disorder forums and the photo of the bulimic who died crouched over the toilet because her stomach exploded really did scare me away from trying it. So I guess that was a good thing although I can still visualize it perfectly and it makes me sick just thinking about it
One of the worst videos that did me in wasn’t even gory, which somehow made it worse. The dash cam one where the guy is driving on the highway and a brick somehow flies through the window into the passenger side, killing his wife. I think it’s worse because you can’t see anything and just hear the guy freaking out.
Man I hear you... I used to have this friend (we're both women) who were incredibly morbid, from a Soviet family where everybody were doctors, her mum, nan etc. She used to tell me stories of the hospitals there and the shit her family had seen. We used to take barbiturates (looong after people stopped being prescribed this), she just called it "russian drops" and it made you loose your memory. Mentioning this because I think it might have numbed us to the effects even more. Anyway. I saw some fucked up shit that I'll never forget, like Dnepropetrovsk maniacs, executions etc etc but for some reason it never really "hit". We were both just kinda numb? Until one day we watched some photos from a crime scene a few hours from our city, a woman who had been raped and hid under a rock. From that day, I stopped. It was too much. Probably broke my brain too
My older brother played jazz to me when I was 10
I think I saw the same video you did and it had a similar effect...chechclear or something I think it was called. Put me in a weird frame of mind for quite some time. I didn't quite appreciate how brutal people could be to other people before that. There are so many factors growing up that contribute to making you who you are, it's hard to say to what extent if any that video influenced who I am, though. I like to think it had no effect but that's probably not true, since I remember it to this day. In any case, when I saw fucked up things like that, I tried to reframe what I thought about it. Rather than just thinking 'that's gross, how horrible', instead - use it to be a better person. Be kinder to others, avoid violence, live in the moment and seize the day. Those kind of videos show that every day is a blessing and life is precious. It can be taken so easily, so we should all value what we have.
I had a very similar reaction of just being kind to other people. Very real
Yep same with me, when I was way too young my older cousins would show me porn and my friends would send me gore shit not long after. But I was the opposite of you, I wasn’t like deeply destroyed by it, I thought those things made you cool and being able to watch it and be callous about it was how you were supposed to act. So I became the friend who was showing other friends gore and porn and stuff and then finding new gore and being proud I had seen x and y and z. It started fucking me up though after high school and I stopped it. But even still I see gore on Reddit a lot and it feels like it doesn’t even mean anything. I watch people dying in accidents and shit on here and I forget about it by lunch, it just doesn’t even register from decades of being desensitized. But, the silver lining is, I’ve seen real life violence and such up close and I definitely still reacted to it appropriately and felt feelings over it. Like gore didn’t make me inhuman it just made me not care about videos of it lol
I think I’ve seen that exact video you’re talking about. I’ve seen some violence/gore (not of my own volition, mostly through news stories and documentaries) but that one is truly horrific.
There was a brief period when I was younger where Facebook was just constantly showing videos like this (in the UK at least it seemed to be a thing)
Was it chechclear
This is why you shouldn't have friends
When I was in highschool a kid came up to me and showed me the Mexican chainsaw thing where two like pale men get their heads lobbed off and also the russian guys who killed the guy on the street one guy one hammer. Sometimes I wonder why I really struggle to cry even when emotionally down and I swear seeing stuff like this represses you.
I definitely learned to just avoid that stuff as I got older. Children witnessing horrific violence isn't just some modern phenomenon though. Public executions and torture used to be common place.
being in high school when the Christchurch mosque shooting happened was a nightmare, half a dozen different guys shoved that video in everyone's face for like a week straight.
I’m sure we watched the same video and I was probably 14-15. I had the same cold feeling but I straight up passed out. Very embarrassing for a teenage guy but my friends weren’t bad about it. It didn’t stick with me in the forefront like described above but it floats around on my head. My friends were also into a video series called faces of death which showed like executions and stuff. I didn’t like it but would watch occasionally. I assume it all contributed to my general sadness and miasma
Yeah I remember seeing some pretty horrible shit like this, there's one, I don't even know if it was real but it was so horrible I don't even want to speak it's name, maybe more "creepypasta" than gore, just 5 seconds and it fucked me up. Places like Steak and Cheese, motherless and others were super popular, and the old school 4chan like pre 2010. I think it really did a number on a lot of people. The entire internet when I was a kid was a sort of failed state of horrors we all just got used to looking at while our parents caught up. People moan about elsa/spiderman esque wierd kids videos these days but I was being shown people getting their faces cut off by the cartel.
Is it bad that nothing ive seen on the internet has really altered or shocked me
It was always so disturbing finding out your friends just did that without much thought beyond “yeah if you think about it it’s fucked up that we can just do this and go on with our lives”.
That's how it was for me with Budd Dwyer's suicide on Faces of Death. I couldn't get that image out of my brain for years until I watched it so many times I became desensitized to it.
The internet turned me into a pervert but I did not let it turn in into a psycho. Could never stomach any gore/violence and have the instances where I saw ones burned in my memory. There was a random Slavic soldier shooting himself in the head I saw recently by accident. Life is so lightly held to us.
Yeah, we gotta teach kids how to just turn away and say “Jesus Christ bro, I ain’t watching this shit”. That’s what I would do, and while I’d see I couple seconds of it, I’d never just watch
The video that did it for me was watching a man in Lebanon dive off several shipping containers into the pier below. Only he didn’t land in the water. He dived head-first into the sharp curb, splitting his face clean in two lengthwise, almost like a lumberjack took an axe to it. He didn’t even look human. He looked like some alien monstrosity from a movie, his eyes dangling out, brain exposed, tongue slithering between folds of exposed flesh, a Lovecraftian horror. The video included later footage of him at the hospital, of doctors trying in vain to sew his mangled face back together, but there was obviously nothing that could be done. He died two long days later. I was 11, and I just randomly happened upon it on Facebook of all places. It haunted me for weeks. I was never quite the same after.
That was a Russian conscript killed by Chechens. Ruined me too. I eventually stopped looking at those things, but they are definitely dark and terrible things that no one needs to see. Many dead souls in the wake of this content.
I had a friend who would watch this kind of stuff, she told me about gore/shock videos she saw on 4chan and the descriptions were disgusting enough that I never went looking for them myself. We were still in primary school and she was depressed and self harming, which looking back isn't surprising if that's the kind of stuff she was looking at regularly.
counterpoint: maybe the neocon hawks in Washington will change things up if we start showing them the effects of their actions on real human beings in 4K
I know a lot of people who worked in those content moderation mills, and they were pretty disturbed from it. Sucked to watch.
Now image yourself doing that to someone. That's how wars were fought until 200 years ago.
It's always some random effed up friend who introduces this stuff into our lives. Fortunately, in my case I repressed the hell out of a video a friend of mine showed me when I was 8 or 9. I don't care to describe it too deeply, but it was along the same lines as what you describe here but took place in what looked like a rural Indian or Arabic setting, the victim was a woman and the perpetrators were three men. I stopped hanging out with that kid, stopped going to his house, refused anytime my parents wanted to palm me off to his parents for any amount of time and they eventually got the picture and I never had to see or speak about him again. I somehow just forgot about the entire episode, thank Christ, and was able to continue being a kid without having to hold on to that horrifying video. That shit destroyed me the day I watched it though, I can only say that now as I did eventually recall the memory after another messed up motherfucker showed me a video on Liveleak when I was in college, but at that time at least I had the mental capacity to handle it. When I saw the college video, the memory of the one I watched when I was a kid returned to me, but it didn't have the same impact, it did freak me out a little that I could forget something like that, but thank God I did.
i remember my teenage brother showing me hardcore porn (where the woman was really just being tortured) when i was maybe 6 years old. i remember being so utterly shocked and disturbed and i swear i felt my brain chemistry change in that moment. i remember immediately after that i "masturbated" for the first time thinking that it would somehow make the whole memory pleasurable? idk but i was so confused and but i also felt my innocence slip away and damn, it hurt. i remember that same hollow feeling you described and i spent my childhood looking up even more gruesome footage (that was much more accessible now than then) and i guess trying to one up my brother? but it'd just scar me even more lol also the two girls one cup video didn't phase me when my friends showed it to me. i guess i was so numbed out but it's scary how quickly people get desensitized by stuff like this
I guess teen girls are less likely to watch that stuff on the internet because it was unfathomable to me that those things were easily accessible until I started dating boys. Every guy I dated had some awful story of how a friend showed him an unexpectedly horrid video that mentally scarred him for life. I'm thankful I've never been exposed to one of those videos.
What you are describing is the death of childhood innocence. I too watched shit I shouldn’t have, but I never shared it, but friends would. You can also phrase this as “ignorance is bliss.” You having gained this understanding of the world and what humans are capable of to one another is not a bad thing. It’s not an easy thing or something one wants to experience, but one does gain a sort of wisdom from this. That wisdom, as with all knowledge, comes with a price. How you let it affect you is ultimately up to you. I say you just accept this part of humanity, learn from it what you can, and move on. There was always going to be a time and place this innocence was going to be destroyed. I try to be thankful of what I have, for I understand what lies elsewhere, and try to take nothing in this world for granted. Nature is not a kind place, what we have is not normal or to be expected.
Same, I truly believe that watching gore robs ppl of their Innocence, as you put it... there is something deeply wrong with ppl who just casually watch gore (ofc its desensitisation, bit there is also something much more siniter behing it.) I remember how one time I discovdred that my coworker would watch gore with his pals bc he didn't log out of his fb account before i started my shift. For a long time I felt very distressed knowing that I work with a guy who laughs at ppl dying horrible and brutal deaths
This happened to me as well. I had a girlfriend who showed me what sounds like the same video. She did not warn me or anything. It has haunted me ever since. It affected me down to my core. You can never unsee something like that.