Real-Life Death Videos Getting Harder to Ignore, Impossible to Unsee

In the 1999 thriller 8mm, Nicolas Cage plays a private detective who watches a graphic film of a girl’s murder. His character becomes obsessed with solving the crime. He watches the footage repeatedly, leaving him psychologically wrecked and prone to violence himself. As one character puts it: “There are some things you can’t unsee … the devil don’t change, the devil changes you.”

This week, millions of people — many unwittingly — saw the devil: a horrific video of 31-year-old conservative activist Charlie Kirk getting shot by an assassin’s bullet, his neck gushing with blood, while hosting a student event at Utah Valley University. The video instantly went viral across social media platforms, autoplaying for hours on X, in particular, to countless users casually scrolling their feeds until moderators eventually clamped down on its spread.

The footage came on the heels of another gruesome viral moment: The death of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska,…