Red rooms- Internet legend or morbid reality?

In 2012 the netizens were shocked with a certain film uploaded to the site BestGore.

Despite the site's theme the grusome film made even the regular visitors had to ask the question "Is this for real?".

"One lunatic, one icepick" unfortunately turned out to be indeed real; a man indentified later as Luka Magnotta killed another man Jun Lin and caught the act on video. He later posted it online.

This particular case wasn't the first and, I will let myself boldly assume, not the last snuff film published on the the Great Wide Web.

Snuff movies are movies that suposedly depicts a scene of actual homicide or suicide. For the first time this term was used by Ed Sanders in his 1971 book "The Family: The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion", where Sanders claims that Manson Family was involved in making this kind of films to document their murders.

It is unknown how many snuff films there are, mainly because there are actually many ways to efficient ways to fake death on screen thanks to practical or computer effects.

There are not really many snuff movies whose authenticity has been confirmed in any way and "One lunatic, one icepick" is one of the inglorious cases where the authenticity was confirmed by a real life investigation.

If you would like to find more about this specific case I highly recommend a three-part chilling document "Don't f*ck with cats". You can find it on Netflix.

And (among other things) it is mostly the lack of facts and proofs that led to the creation of the urban legend of Red Rooms.

There are two versions of this urban/internet legend.

The first was a Japanese creepypasta. The story goes like this:

There was a boy who was addicted to the internet. He heard an urban legend about The Red Room from one of his friends at school. That evening, when the boy got home, he went on the internet to see if he could find out anything more about it.

All of a sudden, a small window popped up with a red background. Written in black, was the message, “Do you like — ?”

The boy closed the window, but it popped up again. He tried numerous times to close it but it just kept re-appearing. Eventually, the boy noticed that the question had changed. Now, it read: “Do you like the red room?” and in the background, a child-like voice said, “Do you like the red room?”

Just then, the screen went black and a list of names appeared in red. At the bottom of the list, the boy saw the name of his friend… The friend who told him about The Red Room.

All of a sudden, the boy became aware of something behind him and he lost consciousness.

The next day, the boy didn’t turn up for school. There was a rumor going around that something had happened to him. The next day, his classmates head the horrible news. The boy had committed suicide, painting his room red with his own blood.

The story above has all the hallmarks of a typical cautionary tale for children. The bad habbit, the morbid curiosity, the punishment for wasting precious time on the Internet. 

"Do you like the Red Room?"

The story was linked to a flash animation based entirely on it. The concept gained further notoriety in 2004 after it turned out the animation was viewed frequently by a Japaneese student from Sasebo, Nagasaki, who commited suicide. 

The other iteration of this urban legend is linked to the popular concept of Dark Web. If you are interested in further information on this I recomend my previous post "Deep, Dark Web".

Rumors say that there are sites where you need to get a special invitation. Pages where nasty rich people log in. They log there for entertainment. And the main atraction is a livestream of an murder. Mostly orchestrated by the higher bidder.

The first question that comes to mind is "Do red rooms exist?".

The answer is...no. 

There is a common tendency to rationalise this kind of wild rumors and give them credit for what they are because:

a) it's so unbelivable that it has to have at least a a grain of truth. 

b) why would someone lie on the Internet?

Firstly, there is no evidence that these types of organized crime cells exist in both surface web and Deep web. 

And if that doesn't convince you, there is still a certain...technical obstacle. 

Assuming red rooms exist; the streaming party would probably like to keep as much of anonymity as they could gain. Publishing in the Deep Web alone doesn't give us anonymity on it's own. We have to take additional measures. The thing is that, the stronger our predicaments we take the slower is our connection. Streaming on a secured, untraceble connection is basically imposible. 

And with that we are yet to stumble on a real proof for the excistence of Red Rooms. 

The ugly truth is that when we are here discussing the possible excistence of this macabre livestreams, the real crimes are happening and being trasmitted on the surface web. 

I'll leave you with that and with a few articles in sources.

Take care! 

Yours truly 

Annie Wood

Sources:

- http://www.the13thfloor.tv/2016/02/12/the-horrifying-controversial-and-secret-history-of-the-snuff-film/
- https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Red_room
- https://valdostatoday.com/news-2/region/2020/01/alabama-man-killed-during-facebook-live/
- https://abc13.com/3302314/
- https://valdostatoday.com/news-2/region/2020/01/alabama-man-killed-during-facebook-live/
- https://abc13.com/5759352/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfpcIgRfYgE