Is it disingenuous that the name of the Reddit community r/WatchPeopleDie uses the word die?
Put it this way: the people in the videos and GIFs shared on Watch People Die do not merely die. Neither do they pass away (too polite), nor go to a better place (too peaceful). They are beheaded, incinerated, exploded, crushed, electrocuted, drowned, mangled, stoned and disemboweled. And their deaths, horrific and tragic as they are, can be watched by anyone with internet access, over and over again.
The number of people who have watched these death videos without signing in to a Reddit account is unknowable. But the number of subscribers to Watch People Die – the number of Reddit users interested enough in seeing strangers get killed to have clicked SUBSCRIBE – exceeds 425,000. That’s nearly the population of Miami.
By another way of comparison, Watch People Die is as big as the Reddit forums r/FinancialIndependence and r/Ass (NSFW, of course). So many of us would like to retire early. So many of us watch p*rn. But since when did so many of us like watching death?
Since forever, it turns out. “All humans have sad*stic urges, masoch*stic urges, voyeuristic urges,” said Dr Gail Saltz, an associate professor of psychiatry at the New York Presbyterian Hospital Weill–Cornell School of Medicine. But if our obsession with death has been around as long as us, it’s only in the past few decades that spectatorship of death has grown widespread.
As is the case of so many things – our inability to focus, our loss of face-to-face intimacy – technology is to blame.
Forty years ago, the cult classic film Faces of Death, a 105-minute compilation of killings and autopsies, brought to light our collective desire to see what JG Ballard called “the horrors of the real”. The legend of Faces of Death spread via word-of-mouth, as everyone from gore enthusiasts to curious eighth-graders sought out what was purportedly the first movie to depict real people dying on screen. It wasn’t (most of the deaths were later revealed to be fake) but it was, truly, the first viral video.
In the 1990s, the ubiquity of digital cameras and dial-up internet yielded the first “shock sites”. The shock-site granddaddy was Rotten.com, a digital house of real-life horrors where you (along with 200,000 other people a day in 2001) went to see the most gruesome content in existence.
By the mid-aughts, anyone with a cellphone could take and share photos and videos of anything, anywhere, at any time. The number of video-focused shock sites proliferated. Once a private act with an aura of solemnity, death had become something whose sights and sounds could be freely consumed by millions of people.
Watch People Die was created in 2012. It grew in relative obscurity until this March, when Motherboard reported that the top post on a popular subreddit was a link to a video of an 18-year-old killing himself – a video that, at the same time, topped Watch People Die. The video was titled “Teenager waves bye, then blows head off with shotgun on YouTube Live”, and it continued for an achingly long half-hour after the suicide, showing the boy’s mother finding his body.
This was too much. Reddit took Watch People Die offline, as administrators grappled with a potentially damning question: was it a violation of Reddit’s terms of service that prohibit “content that encourages, glorifies, incites or calls for violence”?
If you’re like most people, you wouldn’t have needed to actually watch anything on the subreddit, only to read a sampling of its post titles – “Worker burns alive”, “Prison guard slams inmate to death”, “Man still alive while getting cut open with a machete” – to decide that, yes, clearly it was a transgression. How was it any different from shock sites or the now-banned subreddits featuring dead kids and bloody self-harm?
If you’re like most people, though, supporters of Watch People Die would say, you don’t understand what purpose it serves. Its front page announces that it’s not for grossing people out but for “documenting and observing the disturbing reality of death”. The subreddit’s mission is reiterated further down the page: “This community is intended to observe and contemplate the very real reality of death. We are attempting to provide a service by showcasing this content.”
Dr Saltz calls Watch People Die’s claim to being beneficial “a really debatable point”. Sure, the subreddit’s top posts depict deaths that are “very real” insofar as they’re not fake. But what’s there to contemplate after watching an Islamic State militant get blown up by an anti-tank missile? How does watching a girl’s head get shattered by a street sign, the result of trying to take a (nude) selfie out the window of a moving car, provide any sort of service? Moreover, what’s the use in regularly viewing such grisly content?
Dr Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychology professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied the effects of repeated exposure to traumatic media, doesn’t see any psychological benefits. “Curiosity is likely to be appeased by viewing this once,” she told me. “The notion of who seeks this out repeatedly is something that’s difficult for me to speak to.”
No scholarly study has focused on Watch People Die (yet). But Sue Tait, a lecturer in the mass communication program at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, has identified a typology of “spectatorial positions” taken up by viewers of sites whose content, if not community ethos, is like Watch People Die’s.
Tait frames the spectatorship of “body horror” videos in four ways: “an amoral gaze, whereby the suffering subject becomes a source of stimulation and pleasure; a vulnerable gaze, where viewers experience harm from graphic imagery; an entitled gaze, where viewers frame their looking through anti-censorship discourses; and a responsive gaze, whereby looking is a precedent to action”.
The “amoral gaze” is antithetical to the ruminative aim of Watch People Die, where writing “LOL, that idiot deserved it!” on a video of a trainsurfer’s decapitation via overhang, or an attempted robbery of a gun shop, is a bannable offense. Admissions of the “vulnerable gaze”, of feeling emotionally traumatized by the physical trauma you just watched, are likewise at odds with the subreddit’s positive, utilitarian spirit.
When the subreddit’s existence came under attack in March, a moderator drunkenly penned a call to arms, asking “regulars, lurkers, all of you” to share what drew them to Watch People Die and, more importantly, what kept them coming back. His post got 10,000 responses, nearly all of which demonstrated the other, perhaps less immoral, gazes.
“I think death and dying are romanticized in movies and TV,” read the most-upvoted comment, “and I think it’s important for people to be exposed to the real thing to understand the gravity of the topic.”
One redditor – a registered user on Reddit – said the subreddit “makes me feel lucky to be alive, [given] all the stupid things that could happen to me”.
Another said: “Honestly, this is one of the few subreddits that give me a grasp on reality” by showing “how fragile we all are”.
“This is not the subreddit it seems like from the outside,” read a popular response. “It’s not a place where we laugh and make fun of people’s deaths. The reason we keep coming back to is because it really shows us how precious life is.” The sentiment “sometimes you have to watch someone die to appreciate being alive” was well-received.
Read alongside posts such as “9/11 jumper hits light post and turns into red mist” and “Knife-wielding man pulling the intestines out of a woman he recently cut open”, however, that justification seems eye-rollingly insincere. It has the same hollow ring as “I read Playboy for the articles”.
The rationale might be a “self-defense mechanism”, Saltz said. “We keep unconscious many thoughts that shame us, many urges that we don’t want to own or are uncomfortable about and that actually make us more anxious than the thought of death.”
Redditor Bender989 told me coming to terms with death really is what the subreddit is for. He, of all people, would know. He shares gory content one, two, sometimes three times a day, making him by far the subreddit’s most prolific poster.
He’s 25, married and lives in the eastern US. (Like other Redditors I interviewed for this article, he asked me to only identify him by his username.) His Watch People Die origin story is rational: factory worker watches workplace-safety videos, has his curiosity piqued, seeks out more videos of industrial accidents, stumbles across Reddit, and starts posting. He’s conscientious and thoughtful: he posts only high-quality GIFs, not external links, and he often contextualizes his posts with translated news stories. His gratitude for the moderators “taking care of the subreddit, keeping it free of racism and hate speech and whatnot” is effusive. If the Grim Reaper had a PR person, he’d be it.
While his wife knows that he shares videos on Watch People Die, she has no interest in them. Bender989 does have “good, reliable” friends, some in real life and some online, who often send him content to post. Contrary to what an outsider might think, he doesn’t just “live on the internet watching death videos”, he said. He plays video games. He hangs out with family. “The reality is, most of us live normal, everyday, boring lives like everyone else.”
As is true of many other people whose formative years were spent online, shock sites were my first exposure to “the soft white underbelly of the net, eviscerated for all to see”, as Rotten.com’s homepage once read.
I don’t remember how I was introduced to these sites, but I remember looking at them on my family’s desktop computer. I’d click through grids of images dominated by the deep-red color of blood, my feelings of curiosity, guilt, excitement and revulsion eventually coalescing into a dismayed but liberating thought: how the hell is this legal?
Even with a few disturbing videos from my teenage years still seared into the deepest, darkest recesses of my brain, I’d like to think I turned out OK0. There are certain aspects of Watch People Die I’m even willing to defend. Certainly, it exposes you to a side of reality you’d otherwise pass through life not noticing. It can be perversely edifying for people like first responders, morticians and firefighters. It’s even a suicide deterrent. Redditors often cite the messy, scarring aftermath of self-inflicted death.
But there are limits. It’s morally indefensible to request videos of tragic events when they’re still fresh, when people are still grieving: the suicides of Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade, the deaths of XXXTentacion and Lil Peep, the mass shootings in Las Vegas and Texas. Within hours of the media reporting that an airplane accident had killed over 100 people, a request popped up: “Anybody got a video of the plane crash in Cuba today?”
And the children. Oh, the children. “All posts involving children dying at the hands of an adult are banned,” the subreddit says, “unless the death is accidental.” Which means that you can watch a boy get mauled to death by two pitbulls, or another get electrocuted in an internet café.
The subreddit’s longest-serving moderator, a Redditor named GoreFox, said: “I don’t believe that certain content should be censored while others not.” GoreFox believes that the Watch People Die community is mostly “adult males in their 20s to 40s who hold regular mundane jobs just like anyone else.” A midwesterner in his early 20s who works in a kitchen and is a horror movie buff, he’s one such person.
When I asked him if being a moderator of a death video forum has affected his offline life in any way, he responded: “Not in the slightest.” Most of his friends, and a few of his coworkers, know about Watch People Die. “None of them care,” he said. “They either say ‘Cool’, or just look at me weird.” GoreFox is single, but he would have no problem revealing his involvement in Watch People Die to a serious romantic partner. “It’s really not a huge deal,” he said.
What draws him to Watch People Die? “I simply enjoy the content,” he said. “I, and the vast majority of people on the subreddit, don’t get off on it, as so many people like to assume.” He takes issue with the outsiders unfamiliar with Watch People Die whose immediate reaction is that it’s “sick”.
“I suppose they want anything even remotely real and visceral shielded from them, which I find quite sad,” he said. “Kind of like sticking your fingers in your ears and going: ‘La la la.’”
On 27 September, Reddit’s administrators stuck their fingers in the internet’s ears.
The site updated its “quarantine” policy, which makes subreddits that exist in a moral gray area – they don’t violate the site’s content policy but “average Redditors” might find them “highly offensive or upsetting” – harder to view. Quarantined subreddits are only accessible with an explicit opt-in click, and they don’t show up in searches or in default feeds like r/Popular and r/All.
Subreddits devoted to 9/11 and Holocaust denialism, violent misogyny and white nationalism were among those quarantined last month. But so, too, was Watch People Die.
This decision sparked the kind of angry, fatalistic introspection not seen on the subreddit since March’s media-induced crisis. A Watch People Die moderator called the quarantine a “slow death sentence” for the subreddit, which now requires a verified email to view.
“Reddit is no longer the open platform that they sold it to us as back in the day,” he wrote.
In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international suicide helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
