One of the more disturbing things I’ve witnessed recently was a colleague of mine stumbling across a website called ‘Cute Dead Guys’. Thinking the title referred to attractive deceased celebrities, she clicked through. It didn’t mean that at all. Instead, the website was a compendium of photographs showing the corpses of good-looking car-crash victims.
Cute Dead Guys may be more overt in its necrophilia, but it is only a darker manifestation of a broader trend. While concerns are rightly raised about the ubiquity of porn online, there is another unspoken obsession that I would argue is equally as widespread and pernicious – a voyeurism over death.
It is not just on ‘dark web’ snuff websites and chat rooms where this obsession lurks. Death seems to have become an easy way to generate clicks on the mainstream internet. A quick scroll through my Instagram’s algorithm-suggested posts offers me a collection of various dodgy accounts, aiming to farm views from gruesome content. It’s profoundly disturbing.
First up is what purports to be the account of an Indian cricket website, posting, with phoney concern, an image of the ‘tragic’ moment when Australian batsman Phillip Hughes took a fatal ball blow to his neck in 2014. A little further down my feed is an alarmingly realistic animation of the final moments of the Titan Oceangate submersible, up to the point it imploded (the passengers are depicted in a subsequent cloud of blood).
Even the mainstream media appear to be in on this. Opening up the Daily Mail website, I am met with a video entitled ‘Shocking moment DPD delivery driver is beaten to death in cartel-style execution by thugs armed with an axe, hockey stick and shovel’.
Without wishing to direct more traffic to this kind of content, a quick Google for ‘shocking moment’ will give you yet more videos like this from mainstream-media outlets. Internet voyeurs can get a hit from watching paragliders falling to their deaths, a man being gored by a bull, another man being mauled by a bear, or an innocent passerby being stabbed to death on the street.
Two of the most shocking fatal attacks over the past year were on two separate dog walkers, John Hackett in Nuneaton and Bhim Kohli near Leicester. In both cases, they were randomly set upon by a gang of teenagers. Tellingly, the teens recorded their mindless violence on their phones, feeding the appetite for viral violence.
Two of last year’s most notorious mass killers, Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana and Nicholas Prosper – who murdered his mother and siblings before attempting to shoot up his old primary school – displayed a morbid interest in the contents of snuff websites. While neither man filmed his heinous crimes, Prosper admitted that his intention was to achieve global notoriety by committing such an extreme act of violence.
Of course, we cannot hold anyone responsible for murder except for the murderers themselves. It’s not as if anyone can be turned into a vicious killer, just by stumbling across some disturbing videos on the internet. Often, these killers will actively seek out this material, to satisfy a growing obsession with death or violence.
Nor should the media shy away from reporting the brutal truth of murder and violent crime. What might seem like a media circus can also be important for the victims and their families. Equally, the public needs the closure that comes from understanding the full facts of a horrific act – which is one of the reasons why the authorities’ caginess in the wake of Southport was so unwise.
There is, however, a big difference between reporting atrocities plainly and dwelling on victims’ final moments in fetishistic fashion. Algorithms, automated accounts and media barons may have worked out that the pornification of death is a cheap way to drive clicks, but that doesn’t mean we, as a society, should be relaxed about it. It’s time we interrogated this obsession with death, and asked why murder is so often going viral.
Henry Williams is a writer based in London.
