Often, you can rely on your intuition to tell whether a meme is ‘cursed’ or not. Cursed images, as a genre, are generally incredibly weird, both in their content and style of presentation.

What’s more, they’re usually very unaesthetic—they’re the opposite of the usual glam and glitz you’d see scrolling through your social media feeds. Cursed memes don’t want to impress anyone with their beauty. Rather, the creators of such memes want to make the viewers feel uneasy and unsettled.

It’s probably because many people’s social media feeds are filled to the brim with gorgeous influencers showing everyone how ‘perfect’ their lives and travels are that so many people enjoy cursed content.

After all, if all you see are pristine and aesthetic pics every single day without pause, at some point, you’re going to grow bored of them. Unaesthetic, strange, and even downright ‘ugly’ content, then, can offer a fresh, as of yet unseen perspective.

According to Know Your Meme, cursed images are meant to be disturbing and illogical. They usually focus on abnormal internet content. Sometimes, the images themselves are either low-quality or slightly altered to create a more eerie and unsettling atmosphere.

Broadly speaking, if you’re looking at a meme, getting chills, and can feel the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, then you’re likely dealing with a cursed pic.

One issue that cursed meme creators have to deal with is striking the right balance between creating content that is sufficiently weird to stand out from the crowd while also making the images familiar enough to resonate with the audience at least on some level.

If there’s absolutely no relatability, the odds are that the meme might misfire. On the flip side, that’s exactly what some creators go for—spreading confusion and making folks laugh because of how absurd the pics are.

Content creator, comedian, and broadcaster Trev Lewis previously shared his thoughts with Bored Panda about nonsensical memes that practically demand that someone explain the context behind them. According to Lewis, memes that lack context can be considered to be the “purest distillation of what a meme actually is,” in his opinion.

"The standard definition of a meme is, 'an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme,’” the comedian and content creator explained.

“So, if a meme is nothing more than an image, and it's entirely up to the audience to interpret the symbolic meaning rather than offering any sort of caption or explanation, this is the very nature that memes are founded on," he pointed out that the lack of context and the confusion it creates can actually work in favor of the pic, not just against it.

"It makes sense, then, that they are widely popular. If we think back to the earliest popular memes, stuff like the 'I Can Has Cheezburger?' cat, they were basically inside jokes for the terminally online. As the internet became more mainstream, so did memes, but it wasn't that long ago most people weren't familiar with the word and were often pronouncing it 'maymay,'” Lewis told Bored Panda.

“There's something about an inside joke that makes people feel more passionate about it. I suppose it's the nature of exclusivity, or perhaps just the bond we feel when other people share in our niche interests," the content creator noted that there will always be memes that far from everyone will get.

"The truth is there is no perfect formula to give a meme longevity. There are a couple of things that can help, though. If a meme relies too heavily on current events, its relevance will likely fade along with those events. A standup comedy routine about food can be enjoyed for generations, but a talk show monologue about this week's news is going to expire quickly. It's the same principle,” he said.

“Someone may be able to resurface a screenshot that contains the original context, but already you're losing people if the joke has to be explained too much.”

Meanwhile, something else that can help a meme pack some more punch is either condensing the headings down as much as possible or getting rid of them altogether.

"The other thing that helps is, as this genre showcases, not relying on a written language to convey the humor. Slang is a lot like memes in that it's constantly changing and being discarded. A funny phrase today may be seen as corny tomorrow. There's also the language barrier. If an image is funny without words, that's a more universal meme than one that relies on English, Spanish, and so on. The more people enjoy and understand a meme, the more it gets shared, and the more likely it is to live on,” the creator said.