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But as an adult with a trove of cultural context, the mishmash of plots and characters is unsettling. Some of the videos’ transgressions might be obvious to children, like figures from different franchises appearing together. “Things are only creepy to us if we have a clear set of expectations about how they ought to be,” says McAndrew. I don’t have a child, and perhaps unsurprisingly, my Verge colleagues wouldn’t volunteer their own kids as guinea pigs.īut Barrett and McAndrew agree that kids might have a less immediately negative reaction than adults, because, as McAndrew puts it, “adults have more rules.” Adults, by sheer experience, develop a stable framework for how the world works - and the more experience you have with something, the more instinctively wrong any variation might feel. The fact that kids are watching these videos doesn’t necessarily tell us how they feel about them. “I’ve never come across a study so far that tried to induce a sort of creepy, sinister kind of experience,” she says, possibly because of ethical concerns. Unfortunately, we don’t actually know much about what children find “creepy,” says neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions are Made. “Things are only creepy to us if we have a clear set of expectations about how they ought to be.”

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“You don’t really know how to make sense of it. “You’re mixing things that shouldn’t go together, right?” he said. Other times, it’s anything that breaks our deeply ingrained expectations of reality, like the “uncanny valley” of seeing a human-like face with subtly inhuman elements. Sometimes, it’s driven by potential physical threat. McAndrew describes creepiness as a response to ambiguity. I showed Knox College psychology professor Frank McAndrew, one of the few people specifically studying creepiness, a video clip with the swimming superheroes from “Buried Alive.” He readily qualified it as creepy. Like the Reddit poster, I kept trying to make sense of it, I kept getting nowhere, and it bothered me.

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Any coherent narrative soon breaks down, and by the end, everyone is cavorting in a swimming pool full of Chupa Chups-branded lollipops. But the animation is sloppy, sound effects are repeated over and over, and character models are altered in bizarre ways, like versions of Hulk and Spider-Man with baby doll heads.

Its content is relatively tame: four villains knock out a quartet of superheroes and bury them up to their necks in sand, before a police officer played by Frozen’s Elsa saves the day. So why would kids be apparently watching these videos in vast numbers, while adults are repelled by them?įor me, “Buried Alive” inspires the nebulous feeling known as creepiness. Twitter user pointed out the “lifeless and inhuman” animation in a detailed thread, “detached from the guiding hand of human creators.” A member of Reddit’s “Elsagate” forum expressed uneasy bafflement at the constant repetition of colors and keywords: “I keep trying to make sense of all this, but there is none.” But Bridle wasn’t alone in finding them unsettling. Not everyone agreed they were insidiously evil The Outline’s Laura June Topolsky called some of them “crazy but only to adult eyes,” and by YouTube standards, downright harmless.

These videos mix semicoherent stories with tinny nursery rhymes and a liberal dose of surrealism, their scenes recut and posted into endless half-hour compilations that draw anywhere from a few hundred to several million views apiece. They consist of inane, confusing, low-budget animation sequences with seemingly algorithm-chosen titles like 'BURIED ALIVE Outdoor Playground Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes Animation Education Learning Video,” spread across channels with names that range from “Animals Cartoons for Children” to “Battle VS Death Battle.” These weren’t overtly violent, sexual, or scatological videos, but they felt viscerally wrong. Earlier this month, journalist James Bridle launched a wide-reaching debate on the “industrialized nightmare production” of YouTube Kids videos.