Run the Gauntlet Is the Most Disgusting Challenge on the Internet

What is the most disgusting video that you have ever seen on the internet? We’re sure you’ll come up with something. But was it really the most disgusting video on the internet? Certainly, there is always something even nastier and more revolting out there. Wanna prove it to yourself? Welcome to the world of Run The Gauntlet.

RTG is a simple website on which a series of videos plays. However, you may only jump to the next video after having endured the one you’re watching. Then a more horrific one will follow. In the language of the website: the next level. It is a deliberate crescendo of fetishized violence and bizarre shocks, a thrill ride of blurred images and unpredictable, immediate, and candid horror. Meanwhile, the success of the page itself seems to creep even its own creator out, who is known only by the letter G.

The site’s slogan claims it contains “The Most Vile, Puke inducing, Hard to watch Videos on the Internet.” What is the purpose of this website? “For educational purposes only,” of course!

RTG recalls the imagery of gore-sites such as rotten.com in the old days of 90s file sharing, when grotesque videos and inhumane images were hidden and circulated on released CD-ROMs as seemingly harmless software. They border on snuff video levels, featuring gutted humans and animals, terrible accidents in close-up, wounds, elephantitis, executions, and disfigured faces.

The key to RTG is that it challenges itself to go further and further. It will seem harmless at first with, say, two laughing women arm wrestling—until suddenly, a bone breaks. The challenge for the viewer is nothing more or less than to remain seated and watch. If you, at some point, press the stop button, the site prompts you to share your alleged level of callousness on social media platforms and with your friends as well as to surpass the horror level reached next time.

The idea is that you “have seen it all” by the end

The website also offers so-called audience videos that are curated by G, where members of the audience react to videos on the site, be it a pained reaction, shrugging it off, or laughing.

“In all honesty, it’s a little scary that so many people seem to be totally fine with what they see,” G told the Daily Beast.

G told the Daily Beast that he originally built the site for a client in 2010. The idea was to build a platform with gradually more and more extreme videos so that “by the end of it, you’d ‘seen it all and are probably desensitized to anything else on the internet,” he told Daily Beast. However, the client disappeared and G waited until 2015 to launch the site, he told the Daily Beast.

On Reddit, you can find a dozen threads where users vehemently exchange opinions on and are involved in manic conversations about the “worst video on Gauntlet.” Some of the films are called out as fakes by alleged connoisseurs of such gore sites, but that’s not always comforting.

Some users seem conflicted about the site and their own reactions to it.

“The beheading was terrible, because it was also really scary to think about me being in that chair. It was also the most graphic death. I think it should be the last video,” one user wrote. “The video of that dog, that had been skinned alive and looked at the camera, was just disturbing,” another wrote. “Whoever did that was not human. The rest was just disgusting.”

Others were glib.

“Honestly 90% of those videos did nothing to me and I had already seen most of them,” one said. “And the one with the kitten reminded me of when I was 11 or 12 and I killed a rat with a air rifle…”

Perhaps the most memorable justification we found came from a user in a mixed martial arts forum: “I am not interested in watching most of this crap, but I sometimes will test the limits of my humanity just to make sure I haven’t lost it.”

This article originally appeared on Motherboard Germany.