Earlier this month, journalist James Bridle launched a wide-reaching debate on the “industrialized nightmare production” of YouTube Kids videos. These weren’t overtly violent, sexual, or scatological videos, but they felt viscerally wrong. 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 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. 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. But Bridle wasn’t alone in finding them unsettling. Twitter user @Cam_Oflage 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.”

So why would kids be apparently watching these videos in vast numbers, while adults are repelled by them?

For me, “Buried Alive” inspires the nebulous feeling known as creepiness. 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. 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. Any coherent narrative soon breaks down, and by the end, everyone is cavorting in a swimming pool full of Chupa Chups-branded lollipops. Like the Reddit poster, I kept trying to make sense of it, I kept getting nowhere, and it bothered me.

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. McAndrew describes creepiness as a response to ambiguity. Sometimes, it’s driven by potential physical threat. 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. “You’re mixing things that shouldn’t go together, right?” he said. “You don’t really know how to make sense of it. It creates tension.”

“Things are only creepy to us if we have a clear set of expectations about how they ought to be.”

Unfortunately, we don’t actually know much about what children find “creepy,” says neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions are Made. “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. The fact that kids are watching these videos doesn’t necessarily tell us how they feel about them. I can’t run an empirical test either. I don’t have a child, and perhaps unsurprisingly, my Verge colleagues wouldn’t volunteer their own kids as guinea pigs.

But 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. “Things are only creepy to us if we have a clear set of expectations about how they ought to be,” says McAndrew.

Some of the videos’ transgressions might be obvious to children, like figures from different franchises appearing together. But as an adult with a trove of cultural context, the mishmash of plots and characters is unsettling. Many of these clips center on conflicts between the same small group of heroes and villains in a way that’s reminiscent of a normal children’s cartoon. But alongside predictable choices like Spider-Man and Elsa, the regular cast includes the killer from bloody slasher film Scream, and a cartoon Joker who looks specifically like Heath Ledger’s dark live-action interpretation of the character.

There’s an oblivious-seeming blend of the innocent and the symbolically disturbing

The videos involve a disproportionate amount of head-swapping, an apparently popular and pretty innocent children’s trope. But it’s accomplished through a combination of sparkling magic wands and giant syringes, which are treated as interchangeable, despite their very different connotations to adults. Some of the videos involve potentially risqué topics, like villains magically getting the heroes pregnant, but without sexual context or lasting consequences. Overall, there’s an oblivious-seeming blend of the disturbingly realistic and the innocently cartoonish — like brightly colored guns that spit automatic rifle fire, but whose bullets only make an animated flying shark change colors. (To confuse things further, searching their title keywords can bring up recut compilations with more straightforwardly violent and objectionable scenes.)

And it takes a certain level of media familiarity to understand just how different the videos’ shoddy quality and unpredictable plots are from their on-brand counterparts, where companies like Disney enforce strict cohesion and quality control. The quasi- “educational” material is particularly jarring: it consists almost entirely of a stentorian voice repeating the names of colors, and crops up at random times in the middle of unrelated narrative sequences, like a subliminal message that’s been unintentionally revealed.

Harvard Medical School pediatrics professor Michael Rich, who directs the Center on Media and Child Health, argues that even if they’re not creeped out, these knockoff kids’ videos still aren’t necessarily acceptable for children. If someone is still figuring out their expectations of how stories work and characters behave, it might be unpleasantly confusing to encounter something that completely confounds them. That confusion could make them obsessively rewatch something they don’t like seeing. But he’s more worried about videos with violent or sexual scenarios than inane and nonsensical ones.

These YouTube videos are far from the first pieces of children’s media to unnerve or confuse adults. The internet abounds with dark readings of seemingly benign TV series, teasing out indications that SpongeBob SquarePants is the result of a nuclear test, the eponymous protagonist of Doug is delusional, and the Teletubbies are pacified slaves. These are much more specific than a vague feeling of creepiness, but they’re still based on recognizing some fantastical element that kids might take in stride and trying to resolve it with adult logic.

But it’s not just these knockoff videos’ content that’s creepily ambiguous. As Bridle and McAndrew both pointed out, it’s hard to figure out the intent behind them, too. We don’t know exactly how much production is automated: the titles seem generated for SEO value, but there’s a human logic behind scenes where, say, Spider-Man takes out a mortgage on a modest suburban home. The videos feature dadaist half-plots that an actual child might create, but they’re mass-produced and trend-focused in a way that seems cynically commercial. They’re surprisingly weird for something a content farm would churn out, but not weird enough to feel intentionally ironic or surrealist.

It’s hard to figure out what these videos are supposed to do

“There is nothing new about adults being concerned about the potential impact of moving image media on children,” says University of Sheffield professor Jackie Marsh, whose research focuses on children’s digital literacy. “What is new is that the internet has enabled a greater appropriation of children's culture by adults, and vice-versa.” This boundary-crossing, along with the rise of a mass DIY culture on platforms like YouTube, means you might never be able to deduce what a particular piece of media is supposed to do.

The emotion and media experts I spoke to offered pretty straightforward recommendations for hypothetical parents: stay in control of what your children see, and pay attention to how they’re responding to it. YouTube has responded to the controversy as well, rolling out a policy that age-restricts objectionable videos. One of those was apparently “Buried Alive,” which was first put behind a sign-in screen and a warning that it may be “inappropriate for some users,” then completely deleted, alongside some other videos.

Now that I know someone’s child won’t be stumbling across the video, I feel less guilty about admitting that I find it, and some of its counterparts, incredibly entertaining. They’re one part surreal, Aeon Flux-style parody of inane superhero franchise fiction, one part clunky “so bad it’s good” TV, and one part enigmatic message in a bottle. I love the hilariously overused “piercing cackle” sound effect; the videos’ incongruously realistic iPhones and brand-name snack foods; and the occasional dip into pure, startling body horror. Humans don’t like to be around genuinely creepy people or places. But just as we enjoy fear in controlled doses, it’s tantalizing to dwell on the safer ambiguities of these videos, knowing that they will probably never be resolved, and that it doesn’t really matter.