Who Are the Internet’s Anonymous Gore Obsessives?

Jack* first encountered gore at school, when friends would beckon him over, saying they wanted to show him a cool video. Inevitably, when they’d press play, it would turn out to be 2 girls 1 cup or another gross-out internet relic. But other times the videos contained harrowing footage of gangland killings, warfare, or suicide.

Most of us leave teen initiations and trolling in the playground, but the gory content stuck with Jack, who is now 28. “I would say, sophomore year of college, it got really bad, and then it just became worse and worse and worse.” He would look up footage of shootings he’d read about in the news. His mental health declined. “That is when I got, like, down into the rabbit hole of it,” he says.

Depressed and suicidal, Jack would spend hours a day on a well-known death video site, watching speed runs of Elden Ring on one monitor with a constant stream of real-world violence playing out on the other. He knew it wasn’t good for him. The videos would follow him around. Driving past stop signs, he’d get chills as he flashed back to car crash videos he’d seen. “I wanted to stop,” he says.

The site he was hooked on boasts over 3 million members. It grew out of a popular subreddit that was closed down in March 2019 after users posted footage of the far-right terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand that month, in which 51 people were killed. The perpetrator had live-streamed the massacre on Facebook.

The site is currently available on the open web without robust age verification. (VICE is choosing not to name the website in this story.) Footage on the site is categorized into morbid categories—shooting, maiming, cartel killings, execution. Comments under posts contain a mix of edgy humor, racism, and pictures of the site’s anime mascot.

Recently, families of victims featured in the videos have called for the website to be shut down. Murderers, including 19-year-old Nicholas Prosper who killed his mother and two siblings in September last year, have been found to have accounts on the site.

In the wake of Netflix’s Adolescence—a show about a 13-year-old murdering his schoolmate that sparked Serious Conversations up and down the country—there is more attention than ever on online radicalisation. So what motivates people to seek out, and even build a community around, the most vile gore content imaginable?

Dr Joanne Lloyd, a professor of psychology at the University of Wolverhampton and Laura Nicklin, a lecturer in education at the same university, have conducted research into the impacts of watching real-world violence online.

“That’s why now I will look at gore subreddits or websites, because in some way the desensitization helps me disconnect at work.”

They found a range of reasons people seek out real-life gore videos—from curious teenagers, to people watching it as an attempt to build psychological resilience. “A real spectrum of different reasons and ways people interacted with it,” Joanne says. “From some sort of idea of taking it as a medicine—‘I don’t want to, but I’ve got to watch it’—to perhaps the more disturbing way of doing it as a form of entertainment.”

You might wonder just who is out there, watching gore videos due to a sense of necessity. As a trainee mortician, 21-year-old Amy Elizabeth is one such person who uses gore videos to “train” themselves. Originally from the UK, and now living in Belgium, she says she first started watching gore content through NSFW subreddits and Tumblr when as a teen

While she puts her initial interest in gory content down to morbid curiosity, she says watching it has helped prepare her for the grisly reality of facing dead bodies every day in her job. Working at a funeral home in Brugge, she says that the vast majority of deaths she sees are the result of natural causes, but occasionally she has to deal with bodies that are in a bad state.

“That’s why now I will look at gore subreddits or websites, because in some way the desensitization helps me disconnect at work,” she says. “Obviously I feel empathy for that person and their family, and it’s always sad, but I need to stay professional, and if I’m freaking out about the mangled body in front of me, I can’t do my job.”

Amy says watching the videos helped prepare her for working in the funeral industry in a way that even her training could not. “Actual gore, it’s still very taboo,” she says. “I don’t even think my professor knows that gore sites exist.” She is currently getting ready to start new work experience in the US and says she has bought a new book on extreme embalming to read on the journey over. “I never want to be in a situation where I look at a body and think ‘I’ve never seen this before, I don’t know what to do.’”

Some watchers of gore have reported finding the videos addictive—with some comparing the rabbit hole of extreme violent content to that of a porn addiction. Laura and Jo say that through their study, they found some people reported watching content more than they intended to and spoke of negative reactions.

“I think it’s extremely addictive; after you watch one, the morbid curiosity keeps pushing you to look for more and more.”

“Whether that is strictly speaking what we’d call an addiction, I’m not sure if it matters that much,” Joanne says. “But the fact there are people who were struggling to manage [their behavior], I think that in itself is something probably worrying.”

Felipe, an 18-year-old from Brazil says he started watching gore at the age of seven or eight. A tough home life and unrestricted access to the internet led him to the darker corners of the web. He says after some time he became addicted to watching videos of violent real-world events—every time he heard of a violent crime, he would head to death sites to find pictures. He also found himself commenting and posting content.

“Some comments were really mean-spirited and I’m really ashamed of them,” he told VICE. After the murder of his cousin—and coming across videos that included the harming of children—Felipe deleted his account on the site, as well as the videos he’d posted. “I think it’s extremely addictive; after you watch one, the morbid curiosity keeps pushing you to look for more and more, plus some people like the adrenaline of seeing something they shouldn’t see,” he says.

In some cases, gore sites can even be a prelude to aspirations of eternal love. Long-time gore site moderator Russell Ryland, 38, and his fiancé Sarah (name changed for privacy), 37, met on a gore Telegram group that was set up after the subreddit was shut down. They both moderated content on that group and continued after it evolved into a website, but they stepped back because of disagreements with the site’s owners over the direction it was taking.

Meeting the love of your life on a group chat dedicated to sharing decapitation videos might sound like an unlikely scenario. But despite the macabre setting, Sarah says they bonded from a place of mutual trust and friendship. “It’s really profound to me, especially given the type of media that we were both seeking when we met.”

“I haven’t ever really met anyone who is so much like me,” she says. All of their hobbies were the same, their film and music taste matched perfectly—as well as their belief that death content should not be censored. “We would spend a lot of time just talking about current events and stuff. And then, of course the things in the chat, how we would address issues that would come up. And then we ended up deciding that we were, you know, really gonna be together.”

“I think a lot of people will come looking for something real,” Russell says of gore sites. He traces his own interest in gore content back to watching his dad’s copy of Faces of Death when he was a kid and his struggle to come to terms with his own mortality.

For Sarah, it’s a similar story. She calls herself a “sunny nihilist” and it was her own existential crisis that kicked off her interest in death videos. She was drawn in by the idea of seeing lives that were there one second and gone the next. She says she found viewing the videos cathartic in some way.

Of course, views like that might diverge from normie thought, but they’re pretty vanilla on a death video forum. “It’s a judgment free zone, you know what I mean?“ Russell says. “We just connected on a human level, like we would have if we had met anywhere else. But when you’re in this kind of environment, you’re all out there, all the cards are on the table already.”

Russell no longer watches gore, but he still thinks it has a place on the internet. He points to the video of the police killing of George Floyd that sparked the global Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 as a reason not to censor violent footage. “You don’t need to see somebody being killed by the police to know that people get killed by the police. But for some reason, seeing it has way more of an impact, right?”

Russell says gore watchers seek out content for a vast number of reasons—including lots of emergency service workers who, like Amy, work with death in their day jobs. Another moderator Russell worked with was a forensic pathologist. “They’re good people,” he says. “They’re not just losers or degenerate freaks sitting alone in their bedroom. You know, just taking out their frustration on the world.”

Joanne and Louise agreed that while particular communities may form around this type of content, their research showed it’s not just watched by basement-dwelling edgelords and 4chan racists. “I don’t think there’s a ‘sort of person’ that engages in this content,” Laura says. “So many people talked about being exposed to it in adolescence. Maybe it’s part of your workplace culture. Some people talked about a sports culture, so being on football WhatsApp groups and things like that.”

But while the subreddit had to at least attempt to adhere to Reddit’s policies, the spinoff site has developed into its own misanthropic, edgelord dumping ground. Videos of the Israel-Gaza conflict are tagged as “sandshit” and users leave jokey comments underneath videos of gruesome, bloody murders. Russell describes online groups as having a “velocity” in a particular direction. “Whatever direction that movement is in, there’s all kinds of ways you can kind of mitigate it, but it’s sort of an inevitable thing.”

Last month a post listed recent murderers and school shooters who had accounts on the site. Among the names were Solomon Henderson, the 17-year-old who opened fire in Antioch High School’s cafeteria in January this year, killing one and injuring another before committing suicide. Samantha Rupnow, who killed two and injured six before killing herself at Abundant Life Christian School in Wisconsin last December, was also included in the list.

The site’s owners said they could not get into the “specificity of the digital forensics for user privacy reasons”, but did confirm that each of those listed in the thread had held an account. Those accounts are now banned, though it is still possible to view their profiles. Users have left comments on these pages deriding and mocking the killers.

Death videos are also used as propaganda by terror groups. While the gore site in question bans the posting of training or promotional material of proscribed groups, it hosts a whole section of videos dedicated to Islamic State killings, as well as uncensored videos of the Christchurch massacre, whose perpetrator published a far-right manifesto online before the attack. A 2023 study of ten gore sites found all of them featured Salafi-Jihadi and/or extreme right-wing terrorist content.

Gore content is mostly protected under free speech laws in the U.S.—with exceptions for real threats or incitement of violence. Terrorist propaganda can fall into those categories, but it can be hard to say for sure when other videos cross that line.

In the UK, laws that came into effect in March under the online safety bill gave the media regulator, Ofcom, powers to take action over illegal content, including videos promoting terrorism or banned extremist groups.

“I think traditionally, people see gore sites as, like, just the absolute cesspit of the internet, right? And they’re not wrong.”

Websites now have to show they have systems in place to remove illegal material. If they fail to do so, the regulator can get court orders to block platforms or impose fines of up to £18m. But because the death site is hosted in the U.S. and its admins are anonymous, it remains to be seen how much Ofcom can realistically do to remove the site.

The death site’s admins said: “As far as we can tell, the website is already compliant with Ofcom’s legislation and always has been. If Ofcom has suggestions or requests as to how we can better keep underage users off of our platform then we would love to hear them. As it stands we do far more than any other platform that I am personally aware of.

“We proactively remove illegal (terror-promoting, child abuse, and so on) material as we are made aware of it, we forward this all to the relevant law enforcement institutions.”

Ultimately, even if one site is shut down, gore content is likely to pop up somewhere else online. “I think traditionally, people see gore sites as, like, just the absolute cesspit of the internet, right? And they’re not wrong,” Russell says. “But I think there’s this thing that happens where the most extreme and the most taboo content will actually attract a lot of people.”

Jack hasn’t watched gore for the last few months. He says mental health facilities in rural “bumfuck Mississippi” where he’s from are practically non-existent, but he managed to get on a course of medication and things have been looking better recently. He doesn’t miss his hours-long binges on gore, though he worries about the effects it might have on other young men who fall into the hole of watching this kind of extreme content.

“There’s mass shooting compilations on the site, there’s murder compilations, and there’s gun violence compilations. Some are like a sportscast where they have zoom in and zoom out and name tags, it’s insane,” he says. “I almost guarantee mass shooters get inspiration from it.”

*Some names have been changed for privacy reasons