Send this page to someone via email

WARNING: This story contains disturbing content that may not be suitable for some people. Discretion is strongly advised.

Thousands of people viewed a stomach-churning video posted on a Canadian gore website after news spread that it might document the last moments of a man murdered in a sensational case rocking the nation.

The video entitled “1 lunatic 1 ice pick” shows a person in a black hoodie stabbing a man multiple times. The hooded figure later dismembers the body and commits obscene acts with the severed remains.

The scenes have eerie similarities to a Montreal crime scene discovered on Tuesday, where police allege Luka Rocco Magnotta killed and dismembered an acquaintance before mailing pieces of the body to Ottawa.

Police say they believe a video of the murder was posted at an Edmonton-based gore website and are having difficulty getting the owner of the site to take it down.

Story continues below advertisement

The disturbing video, which was viewed 300,000 times in just four hours on Thursday, has launched a debate about whether graphic gore websites are simply a depiction of reality or a dangerous social deviance.

SOUND OFF: What do you think? Should gore sites be better regulated or should people be free to post and view whatever they want?

“I’m exposed to reality on a daily basis, so this video was just another example of what I see people doing every day,” said Mark Marek, Best Gore’s webmaster, who posted the video five days ago after receiving it from a member, in an email to Global News.

Marek said he disabled “1 lunatic 1 ice pick” temporarily on Thursday afternoon because his server was not able to carry the load.

Marek bills his Edmonton-based website as a “reality news website” and says it specializes in showing the true nature of human beings.

Visitors to the site can view suicides, stonings, murders, workplace accidents, torture, body modifications, traffic accidents, sexual disasters and a number of other human horrors.

“What attracts (visitors) to Best Gore is the ability to see the truth, to see reality without censorship because they don’t want to live in a fantasy,” he said. “For them life with rose-colored (sic) shades permanently mounted on their noses is not an option.”

Story continues below advertisement

Best Gore is far from alone in the online gore business. There are dozens of websites featuring similar atrocities.

But some experts say the popularity of such websites are not driven by a search for truth, but dangerous social tendencies.

“All of us have some interest in gory things,” said John Bradford, a forensic psychiatrist at The Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre. “There’s a natural curiosity.”

The problem with the websites, according to Bradford, is they attract people with serious difficulties.

“Some of these websites would bring these much more fringe, much more problematic people, into contact with things that could turn them on sexually or motivate them to commit crimes.”

About ten per cent of the population has some form of paraphilia, an umbrella term for sexual gratification through bizarre imagery or acts, according to Eric Hickey, a criminal psychologist and dean of the California School of Forensic Studies at Alliant International University.

Hickey said gore websites are a danger to society because they can act as gateways for some of these people to turn the bizarre into the criminal.

“It is a form of social exhibitionism and they get to be somebody,” Hickey said. “They get to be heard. They get to be seen.”

Story continues below advertisement

The gruesome story unfolding online and in Montreal has thrust the ever-present tension between the right to be seen and heard and social restraint back into the public discourse, with some arguing it’s time the government steps in and makes some rules on the Internet.

Internet service providers are already required to report anyone using their services to make, view or distribute child porn.

Toronto-based lawyer Lorne Honickman of McCague Borlack said it’s time to do the same when it comes to reporting images of all illegal activity, including murder.

“It may not be that the posting is illegal, but you could make it so the not reporting is illegal,” he said. “Maybe that’s the way we can start taming the wild west.”

Honickman suspects the investigation may be further along if such a reporting law existed in Canada.

American lawyer Roger Renville claims he tried to report the grisly video to police in Toronto and the U.S. as early as May 26 and May 27.

“The video is horrific and the comments associated with the site prepared the viewer a little but . . . watching the video, I was both horrified and shocked,” he told Global News.

There is a section of the Criminal Code that could cover the video’s violent pornographic elements. Section 163 of the code makes it an offence to make, print, publish, distribute or circulate any obsence materials.

Story continues below advertisement

Obscene materials include those that depict undue exploitation of sex and of sex combined with crime, horror, cruelty and violence.

Under the code, the distribution of the “corrupting” materials could be justified if the public good was served.

Marek said sites like Best Gore should be supported and promoted as a way to make the world safer by letting people know the risks out there.

“Best Gore exposes the real threats – the drunk drivers, the animal aubsers, etc – they are the ones who need to be regulated, not websites that expose them.”

Marek knows people would like to see him shutdown and said his PayPal account is banned and some advertisers have pulled their ads.

But increased regulation on the internet is inevitable, according Alex Sevigny, a social media expert at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont.

“I think progressively we are going to start seeing the internet as any other public space,” he said. “We regulate our highways…There are some basic rules of the road and I think the same thing is going to happen on the internet.”