cursed image

A single bathroom cubicle with two toilets, side by side.

A discarded Tickle-Me-Elmo peering out lasciviously from the top of a wheelie bin.

A burger, but the patty in the middle is just wasps.

Anything involving abandoned mannequins, preferably with a child crying in the background.

These, my friends, are cursed images - or, if you like to be dramatic, Curséd Images.

Like all terrible things, the cursed image emerged as a meme via Tumblr, around 2015. As far as image-based memes go, it’s is a type unto itself: something that you recognise when confronted with it, but struggle to articulate. As with so many forms of ambiguous visual exchange, it’s easier to define the cursed image by exclusion: what it is not, rather than what it is. And what the cursed image is not, is a blessed image (or, yes, Blesséd Image).

The blessed image is straightforward. It’s an image - usually a photograph, rarely manipulated - of something that cannot possibly be associated with fear, pain or unhappiness. Science shows us that 45% of blessed images depict small domestic lizards wearing hats, with a further 30% representing a very dedicated twerking kitten. The blessed image elicits an uncomplicated emotional response, combining sentiment and amusement. Viewed cynically, it’s the essential fodder of a thousand internet content aggregators. Realistically, it’s one of the few things that palliate the unrelenting but entirely voluntary hellscape of Online.

It’s too simple to class any distressing or disgusting image as ‘cursed’. While their blessed counterparts are, as I’ve said, straightforward, cursed images operate within a fairly specific - and subtle - set of parameters (although one thing which they have in common is the quality of being ‘real’, neither staged nor Photoshopped). Gore and graphic violence, for example, may make us recoil, but these are straightforward scenes. The worst has already happened, the blood is spilled, and there is little left to the imagination.

The true cursed image is one which sets the imagination running, either via absence or juxtaposition. Something has to be wrong, something out of place, or disaster imminent. It taps into the same abject fears that power our most unsettling dreams - the ones where our teeth fall out and we’re forced to use the bathroom without privacy. It’s not a coincidence that so many cursed images feature toilets - there’s even a Twitter account dedicated solely to Toilets With Threatening Auras. There’s something almost Rabelaisian to these images, where our safe boundaries and categories of biology are broken down, and the threat of natural decay creeps into our highly sanitised, technological lives.

This being the case, the cursed image tends to deal in the banal and recognisable, rather than fantasy. What could be more mundane than a child’s birthday party, or a playground? As with toilets, the aesthetics of childhood are rich fodder for cursed images, because the implication of innocence and vulnerability creates the possibility of corruption/destruction. Hence the abundance of clowns, playgrounds and creepy dolls.

When the suggestion of pain and fear hovers around the everyday, it provokes a slower, more fundamentally disturbed reaction than the quick recoil we experience after seeing something graphic. These are images that show a process, not results. Or, in some cases, an absence of process, with equally disturbing implications. It’s not surprising that so many images labelled as ‘cursed’ exemplify the concept of horror vacui, or fear of empty space. Again, these images tap into our subconscious fears, of falling from a great height, or being shut up alone in a dark abandoned room.

The cursed image is something that we know when we see it. It’s a weird thrill whose closest parallel is true crime - letting us experience a shiver of disgust from the comfort of our own living rooms. With dedicated subreddits, Twitter feeds and even Instagram accounts delivering regular doses of aesthetic trauma, it’s clear that we enjoy being disgusted, safely within the boundaries of a (cursed) digital image.