Most people are a little hungry for blood, says Gail Saltz, an associate professor of psychiatry at The New York Presbyterian Hospital Weill-Cornel School of Medicine and frequent expert guest on shows from Oprah to 20/20. “People want to go see car races not just because they love the racing of cars, but because a car might hit the wall and blow up,” she says. “There is a fascination with seeing disasters, horrific things.” A part of every human’s nature is to be a little sadomasochistic, she says. Society, though, keeps those impulses at bay, controlling “urges to do something terrible,” she says.

Seeing death can also give people a rush, as long as it’s from a safe distance. In flipping through images of, say, Princess Diana’s fatal car accident, we get the thrill of feeling close to danger without actually being in danger. “You’re safe in your seat behind your computer,” Saltz says.

But people are also drawn to looking at tragedy in order to confront humans’ greatest fear.

“We are probably more afraid of death than anything else,” Saltz says. “The fascination with viewing someone who is [dead] … is driven by that sort of supreme fear of ours which makes us want to know more and to understand the experience and feel like we have some kind of window in.” It could be a way of trying to feel prepared for something we can never truly be ready for.

It could also be schadenfreude.

“[It’s] partially driven by the wish to have the things they imagine the celebrities have,” Saltz says. “I can feel less terrible about [the fact that] I don’t get to have it because look at the price you pay: You pay with your life.”

Scott Bonn, a professor of criminology and sociology at Drew University, agrees. People “love disasters of all sorts,” he says. A dead celebrity photo, for some, is reassurance. “The average person … their lives are rather mundane and not that happy. These things divert our attention and remind us after all, as mundane and shitty as my life might be, it’s not that bad.”

Bonn wrote a book about America’s obsession with serial killers. He says that reading about the heinous crimes committed by John Wayne Gacy or Jeffery Dahmer, or looking at pictures of the murder scenes, are ways of getting a cheap thrill, like watching a scary movie. “It’s a form of escapism,” Bonn says. “There’s an inherent need to get close to the edge of the abyss and look in without falling in.”

But that’s nothing new. In 1934, hordes swarmed the just-ambushed automobile of gangsters Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, snipping off locks of hair and flipping open pocket knives to slice ears and fingers off the notorious criminals.

Compared to that, looking at pictures online seems almost benign.

* * *

As the camera rolls, a group of four white tourists take their seats at a restaurant, where bellydancers gyrate around them as they look over the menu. Waiters bring out platters of “special dining implements.” Tonight they’ll have the house special: the brains of a live monkey.