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You might remember us featuring similar social media projects, such as the X account 'Cursed Images' and the Instagram account 'Cursed Pic', but as writer Matt Moen, who has been interested in the subject, highlighted in Paper Magazine, the cursed image as a concept originated from a Tumblr blog in 2015.
"At the time, I had a voyeuristic hobby of searching the archives of Flickr to look at forgotten flash photography from years in the past," the owner of cursedimages.tumblr.com, a female photography and film student from the American Northwest, told Moen.
"Some of these forgotten photographs just had an eerie mood about them, like someone had captured a moment from a dream or another life. I was particularly interested in finding photos of dark and empty rooms, mannequins and costumes, all of which became common themes among cursed images."
The very first picture ever posted to cursedimages.tumblr.com was that of an old farmer surrounded by crates of red tomatoes in a wood-paneled basement, expressionlessly staring at the camera.
"It's the perfect cursed image to me because there's nothing inherently unsettling about any part of it," the owner of the blog said.
"It's a totally mundane moment transformed into something else by the camera and the new context I've given it."
The image gives birth to a feeling that you've accidentally walked in on some strange produce-based ritual and witnessed something you were not supposed to.
The effect is visceral: a cocktail of dread, unease, disgust, and confusion washes over you, which is a common reaction to the content of this Instagram account feed, too.
Or as Moen's interviewee puts it, "they're images of memories that never actually happened to you, but the moment you see them, it's suddenly happening to you."
"Memes spread well when they resonate," Ryan Milner, an assistant professor in communications at the College of Charleston and author of a book about the rise of meme culture, The World Made Meme, also told Moen.
The professor pointed out that most of the time, memes resonate because they're either funny or sentimental, but in the case of cursed images, they "resonate because they're creepy, because they're scary."
Ultimately, whether we're creeped out, afraid, amused, or touched, all of these kinds of memes provoke "different emotions that make us feel something." And we share what makes us feel something because it disrupts the status quo.
According to Milner, cursed images blur the lines between the genuinely-supposed-to-be-scary and the scary-but-also-funny-and-playful.
"That balance ... makes you raise your eyebrows, stuff that is striking and funny in a really kind of morbid way."
Which is probably why social media accounts like this one are so intriguing to scroll at work.
