“This is a gore-hound’s decathlon . . . it’s an actual snuff video.”

That’s just one of the shockingly excited online reactions to the now infamous kill video.

Five days before Luka Rocco Magnotta became the subject of an international manhunt, a horrifying video dubbed “1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick” was posted online, appearing to show a man stabbing a naked and bound victim with an ice pick, and then dismembering the body.

Best Gore, an Edmonton-based website that published it, got 300,000 hits in four hours on Thursday alone. The popularity of the grisly, 10-minute video reveals a disturbing online subculture with an appetite for videos that show actual murders.

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“You can tell the killer is a weak b----, barely making a dent with that knife,” one commenter writes on The Young News channel, which posted the video last week.

“Seriously, what’s disturbing about this vid is the music they added,” writes another, commenting on the New Order song “Truth Faith,” which is also featured in the horror film American Psycho.

Others complained about the lack of blood and commented on the victim’s body (“Raw a-- fat really does not whet the appetite.”) Another expressed nonchalance about a person being killed, but said “if it is true that he harms animals, that burns my a--.”

A frequent complaint was that “1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick” doesn’t appear to show the actual death of the victim — just the torturing, stabbing and dismembering.

“This one doesn’t even show the guy getting killed at all — his face or anything,” one person commented.

“There is this really disturbing underbelly out there that normal society doesn’t know anything about,” said Steve Lillebuen, author of The Devil’s Cinema, the story of Edmonton filmmaker Mark Twitchell, who turned his horror script into a real life murder in 2007.

Lillebuen, who researched snuff films for his book, said sites that specialize in gore videos appeal to a sense of morbid curiosity.

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“People want to get right close to the edge as possible but don’t want to go all the way, and maybe that’s what these sites are providing, is that thrill,” he said.

Beyond murders, gore websites feature videos that claim to show the gruesome aftermath of car accidents and bombings, torture and suicides. On one gore website, ‘1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick’ was the most popular video this week alongside a bloody motorbike collision and a man slowly dying after being mutilated by a machete.

Mark Marek, the webmaster of Best Gore who lives in Edmonton, said in an email Thursday that people are attracted to his website “because it allows (them) to see the truth . . . reality without censorship.

“They don’t want to live in a fantasy. For them life with rose coloured shades permanently mounted on their noses is not an option. That’s why they are on Best Gore,” he wrote.

Marek said the website “contributes to safer neighborhoods and makes people more respectful” because, for instance, it stops people from speeding. He said a viewer from the U.S. contacted Toronto police after members of the site became suspicious that Magnotta was the killer.

But Lillebuen said the widespread viewership of the video could be exactly what the killer wants.

“Killers often make videos for private use so they can watch their exploits again,” he said. “But this was put out there for an audience.”

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