Snuff and Stuff: A History of Internet Shock Content 

by H.J. Dutton

It’s eighth grade. You’re at a cafeteria table picking through dry salad when the boy next to you nudges your side. Turning, you see he has his phone out. He says something along the lines of, “Hey man, check this out. You gotta see this; it’s nuts. Seriously crazy shit.” So, curious, you lean over as he boots up a video. In it, a man’s head explodes. 

Lunch is effectively over. 

For many Millennial and Gen Z readers, the above scene is a core memory. You remember different details,, but the essential experience is the same: you saw something you were never supposed to see. Either you searched for it after hearing kids whisper about it at school, or you were unfortunate enough to stumble across it on Reddit, Instagram, or whatever other social media site you surfed at the time. Maybe it didn’t scar you, but you never, ever forgot it. 

For me, that video was the Robert Budd Dwyer tape. Dwyer served as Pennsylvania State Treasurer for over five years before he was indicted for bribery. In response to the accusations, Dwyer held a press conference in which he stood by his claims of innocence and lambasted the media. Then, from a manila folder, Dwyer withdrew a handgun. Before anyone could intervene, Dwyer shoved the gun in his mouth and fired. Multiple state and national news networks broadcasted Dwyer’s suicide live to thousands of Americans.¹ 

Three decades after Dwyer’s death, I was halfway through middle school. I’d been scrolling through a now near-dead platform called iFunny in class when the footage of Dwyer’s death popped up on my feed. What I remember most was the suddenness. No blam, no brain matter. He simply dropped. I recall, in vivid detail, the image of a blood faucet pouring from his nose. This experience – coming across a snuff film – is more common and likely than people think. 

Shock content, especially gore videos, have existed on the internet nearly since its inception. In 1996, Thomas E. Dell launched Rotten(dot)com. The site functioned as a no holds barred archive in which browsers could access content strictly banned on other sites. It was a loud, angry middle finger to the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA), a move that sought to limit what content minors could access and view online. Because Dell limited his site to public-domain, news, and medical content, there was little the CDA could do.² Millennials may recall the site for its graphic documentation of Saddam Hussein’s regime in the late 90s and early 2000s. In 2012, Rotten went offline. Among lawsuits and other factors, the site simply couldn’t compete with platforms that allowed for broader, less regulated archives of content.³

Rotten’s major competitor in the early 2000s was Ogrish(dot)com. Launched in 2000, Ogrish distinguished itself from its predecessor through its prioritization of raw video footage over Rotten’s more static clinical content.⁴ On Halloween of 2006, Ogrish founders shut the site down and redirected its user base to a new site named Liveleak(dot)com. LiveLeak quickly became the premier shock site primarily due to its lack of moderation. Editors refused to take down content, regardless of gratuitousness. Among its most notorious content was geopolitical and war footage, often submitted by active soldiers. On May 5 of 2021, LiveLeak shut down, a result of burnout after moderators attempted to restrict certain content.⁵

The underlying source of the shock site’s success is deceptively simple. The initial allure stems from morbid curiosity. The more someone talks up a particularly nasty photo or video, the more you think about it. The more you think about it, the more you wonder just how bad it is. This need to investigate the taboo stems from evolution. As humans, we are wired to assess threats and dangers from a safe distance as a means of ensuring our continued survival. By seeking out disturbing content we’ve heard of but haven’t yet seen, we satisfy this natural itch in a way that doesn’t place us in physical harm’s way.⁶ 

This need to know persists through thrill. Like roller coasters, horror films, and other intense experiences, the viewing of shock content can release chemicals into the brain such as endorphins and adrenaline, a result of our fight-or-flight response’s activation. Although the experience evokes stress hormones, the resulting rush also results in a natural high. Gore videos offer easy access to said high.⁷

Over the years, certain videos have achieved a legendary status in the online cultural consciousness. Such status is perhaps most strongly associated with “lost media” or videos merely rumored to exist. The former function as internet urban legends, the “worst of the worst.” Below I’ve listed some of the more notorious pieces of media still rumored to circulate on the web today. For obvious reasons I will not include links to any of these videos, and I would not recommend anyone seek them out. They’ve been mostly scrubbed off the web for a reason. 

Nick Berg’s Execution

In 2004, 26-year-old telecommunications contractor Nick Berg traveled to Iraq to aid in the repair of communication towers after the war. Iraqi police detained Nick Berg for 13 days when police discovered an Israeli stamp on his Passport, after which he was released without charge. Not much later, a video surfaced online. Nick Berg sits on the floor in an orange jumpsuit, restrained. Behind him stand five masked men, among them Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, founder of the terrorist cell Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad. Nick Berg reads from a script. Once finished, Zarqawi takes a blade to Nick’s neck and beheads him. It is one of many terrorist execution videos to crop up on the internet in the 21st century, and it remains one of the most infamous due to the global outrage it sparked (Whitaker et. al., 2004).⁸

1 Guy 1 Jar

In 2008, Alexey Alexsandrovich Tatarov uploaded a video that would become infamous and legendary among internet meme culture. In it, Tatarov, naked, stands above a roughly 3.5 inch glass jar. Tatarov proceeds to squat over and sit down on the jar, inserting it deep into his rectum. Just when you think the video can’t possibly get worse, you hear the glass break. I’ll let you imagine the rest. 

3 Guys 1 Hammer

Throughout June and July of 2007, two 19-year-old serial killers in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine – Igor Suprunyuk and Viktor Sayenko – bludgeoned a total of 21 people to death, including young children. They deliberately picked vulnerable targets, such as the elderly and those among the city’s homeless population. The most infamous of their killings, though, was that of 48-year-old Sergei Yatzenko, one of seven victims whose last moments the boys recorded. In this video, the boys laugh as they repeatedly strike Yatzenko with hammers and screwdrivers. Though they were not the first killers to record their actions, their footage is a rare instance of its kind ending up in the public eye.⁹

Funkytown

Widely considered one of, if not the worst video on the internet. The exact date of its uploading is hazy, but it was rumored to have appeared in 2016-2017. The low quality footage depicted a Mexican cartel execution in which a man whose face has been flayed off is kept alive via stimulants. The man is repeatedly maimed with boxcutters and machetes. Beneath the man’s screams, the song “Funkytown” by Lipps Inc. can be heard, hence the video’s nickname. The identity of the cartel responsible for the murder is unknown. 

1. Magoon, Kekla. “Pennsylvania Politician Kills Himself at Televised Press Conference: Communication and Mass Media: Research Starters: EBSCO Research.” EBSCO, 2022, www.ebsco.com/research-starters/communication-and-mass-media/pennsylvania-politician-kills-himself-televised. ↩︎
2. Yago, Dena. “Rotten Dot Com.” The Paris Review, 6 May 2026, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2026/05/06/rotten-dot-com/. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. Astley, Mark. “Ogrish Retrospective Part 2: Uncover Reality .” CVLT Nation, 28 Aug. 2019, cvltnation.com/ogrish-retrospective-part-2-uncover-reality/.  ↩︎
5. Vincent, James. “Liveleak, the Internet’s Font of Gore and Violence, Has Shut Down.” The Verge, The Verge, 7 May 2021, www.theverge.com/2021/5/7/22424356/liveleak-shock-site-shuts-down-itemfix.  ↩︎
6. “Kids and Horror Content.” American Academy of Pediatrics, 21 Jan. 2025, www.aap.org/en/patient-care/media-and-children/center-of-excellence-on-social-media-and-youth-mental-health/qa-portal/qa-portal-library/qa-portal-library-questions/kids-and-horror-content/.  ↩︎
7. Ibid. ↩︎
8. Whitaker, Brian, and Luke Harding. “American Beheaded in Revenge for Torture.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 12 May 2004, www.theguardian.com/world/2004/may/12/iraq.alqaida.  ↩︎
9. Mosby, Steve. “How True Can Crime Fiction Be?” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 5 June 2014, www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/jun/05/true-crime-fiction-real-events-steve-mosby. ↩︎