From the classics, to the obscure, to the more niche trends, memes are always a great way to react to things online. But while most of these reaction images are harmless, there’s a small contingent of memes that people don’t love to see pop up on their feeds. These are the cursed memes, or cursed images, as they’re also often referred to.
But what exactly is a cursed meme—and does looking at one truly doom you to eternal bad luck?
Cursed memes: What are they?
A cursed meme, or cursed image, is hard to define exactly, but it usually consists of a found photo that is unexplainably disturbing and captivating at the same time. Once you land on a cursed meme, you can’t look away.
According to Know Your Meme, the term first appeared online in 2015 and they quickly inspired the creation of entire social media accounts dedicated to posting the specific genre of memes.
The website credits the idea of cursed images to a Tumblr page of the same name. The first cursed image, which received over 1200 notes on the platform, was an image of an elder man surrounded by crates of tomatoes. “This image is cursed,” the caption proclaimed.
The spread of cursed memes
In the years that followed, the idea of cursed images migrated from Tumblr to X, formerly known as Twitter. Now-inactive user @cursedimages began an account in 2016, exclusively dedicated to posting these kinds of images, and gained over 100,000 followers in a few months. The explosion of the new genre of meme also attracted media attention with publications like the New Yorker writing explainers on what a cursed image was.
Reddit soon got in the game, with the creation of the subreddit, r/cursedimages. The concept of cursed memes also evolved throughout the 2010s, with the introduction of cursed emojis, cursed videos, and cursed comments also entering the conversation.
Cursed memes on TikTok
In 2020, TikTokers started to share their version of cursed images. The trend used the sound clip “Rhythm thief but cursed,” from TikToker @.hakey, and usually featured video edits of the user or their friends using cursed images.
By mid-April, a number of TikTok’s biggest names, like Charli D’Amelio, Addison Rae, and James Charles, had jumped on the bandwagon, posting their own variations on the trend and receiving millions of likes.
@charlidamelio @gemmah_ ♬ Rhythm thief but cursed
Although cursed images are designed to make people feel uncomfortable, their uncanny nature—plus their ability to convey that nothing and everything is wrong at the same time—make them an unusual addition to the meme canon.