It is my firm belief that some images should never have seen the light of day. This is not for a lack of appreciation for “art” (no matter how loosely that is defined), but more a commentary on work that is meant to shock or appeal to our more absurdist tendencies. Ever since when Flash was the “hot new thing” to animate things with (and that was a long time ago) the internet was even then a hub for animated videos, shorts or gifs. Communities sprung up among video sharing sites like YouTube or even Vimeo, and for the most part these videos were crude but humorous and had some semblance of sanity. But there were the odd users who post videos that, once found, go viral. I would place such videos on a sliding scale of “near normal” (mostly hand drawn or high quality video) to “weird” (made with free software) to “jarring” (unexpected scenarios with very high production value). The upper edge of this scale, characterized by videos like “I’m not scared”, became intensely popular, as its childlike art style soon gave way to gory scenery that viewers found quite jarring. “Salad Fingers”, a two dimensional drawn miniseries, depicted a green, cancerous man with long “salad”-like fingers wandering a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Another ubiquitous animation, this time Claymation, depicts a class of children being led into a portal by Satan, who then shows them images of the apocalypse.

Again, the innocent-appearing video rapidly devolves into some sort of nightmarish scene shocks and appalls anyone who wasn’t expecting it. One can find endless videos of purposefully low quality characters interacting with each other, often with hollow facial expressions, mismatched skin tones, voice-to-text dialogue and very lumpy animations. The truly bizarre stuff is usually very high quality, which makes it all the more fascinating (and likely to catch you off guard). Incredible lighting, seamless editing, and multiple camera angles draw the viewer in for a shocking finale. Unlike most viral videos, the animators usually become popular, and with this popularity comes more sequels. Sequels that, alas, are but hollow semblances of their progenitors. The shock is lost; the morbid escalation is now expected. The viewer is ignorant no more, and now loses the feeling of having their head dipped in ice water, or having the hairs on their neck stand on end. The impact is lost, and soon too goes the appeal.