This Instagram Page Is Sharing Cursed Images And Here Are 50 Of The Best Of The Worst Ones

As far as internet memes go, cursed images are fairly novel, only showing up around 2015, in that now partially empty online haven, Tumblr. Interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be a set definition for how to create a cursed image, besides the fact that it needs to evoke a specific emotion. In a sense, it’s a rare case where a meme has to happen naturally as it can’t really be “fabricated.”

The original “gatherers” of cursed images, the aforementioned Tumblr blog, and a slightly later Twitter account all struggle to pinpoint what exactly is the draw for these pictures. The general belief is that they simply make someone slightly uncomfortable and tend to raise more questions than they answer. It’s clear from the images here that more context is needed. 

Nevertheless, older cursed images do have a few aesthetic similarities. Many are taken with cameras from the early 2000s and are clearly not the work of professional photographers. There is no color correction, normally the flash is close to blinding and the framing is amateurish. But this older style also tells our brain that these aren’t staged images and that they haven’t been altered by modern technology. 

These days, filters, photoshop, and a plethora of simple phone apps allow the average person with just a smartphone to take and create high-quality photos, but at the cost of many, many images out there being modified to look more “beautiful,” which now makes our brain understand that these things are staged or possibly entirely false. A cursed image seems more real because there aren’t any of the normal markers of digital editing, so it appears more like a strange, strange documentary. 

While it is possible that many of these images are staged, they “read” as real, but modern enough to make us wonder why our contemporaries did these things, while also old enough to discount the use of image modifying software. There perhaps is some element of the uncanny valley at play here, as our brains find the pictures vaguely familiar, but with just enough out of place to put us on edge.