While in some images the source of the “horror” is pretty clear, a few might make you uneasy without any immediately discernible reason. Like that feeling of being watched, then wheeling around to see a random cat up on a balcony following your every move, sometimes our thoughts and body react faster than our conscious thoughts can keep up.

Part of the explanation may lie in our evolutionary past, where, understandably, we needed the ability to quickly discern danger to avoid it. It’s not just lions and tigers, rot, disease, and poison were equally dangerous to our ancestors, which is probably why things we feel are disgusting capture and hold our attention so effectively, compared to “neutral” images. 

As strange as it might seem, we have adapted to being okay with many of these “negative” stimuli, as long as we can control them to some degree. Spicy food would be one example, although that is most likely a result of creative cooking, then a search for adrenaline. However, horror movies and thrillers easily fall into this category, as do enjoy being creeped out and scared to some degree. 

Before smartphones became so widely available, images required film, which is costly and takes time and energy to develop. So it would be pretty rare for it to be used for mundane, yet strange occurrences like the ones here. So by making the means of capturing an image more common, it also unlocked the possibilities of people interested in making compositions or things that give off a cursed energy. 

Even if one isn’t an adrenaline junkie, which already is a pretty pejorative term, there is still something pretty interesting about these pictures. In many cases, they cause significantly more questions than they answer, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It can be an interesting journey to try and assemble a story out of the elements in these images, whether staged or completely real. 

This comes from the tendency our brain has to assemble information into a story, even where there is none. Certainly, most things don’t just happen, there is something or someone that causes it. If a can of beans is upended into a shoe, one can quickly surmise that a living being had to take the can, open it, position the shoe, and then dump it. 

It’s very human to take random pieces of data and very quickly assemble a narrative. Take the previous example of the beans and a shoe, an old-fashioned example of a cursed image. What if the tale I presented was completely incorrect, and the beans were poured into the shoes and then transported that way to wherever they were photographed? There is no way I can disprove this theory, yet it already deviates from the previous one. 

The same exercise can be applied to any and all of the images featured in this post. Like what was the thinking behind the name and logo of “Shrek’s Pizza?” Was the owner a fan? Were there in-depth discussions about the copyright risks or if any menu items could be “themed” to the intellectual property? We will never know, but as a thought experiment, it’s entertaining. 

It’s also interesting to consider the fact that many, if not most of these images were not taken with the intention to bestow a “cursed” feeling upon the reader, rather, the photographer just wanted to capture a moment. This raises the curious possibility that certain compositions are “cursed” regardless of the author's intent.