Assustador

» see assustador.com.br as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Assustador opened in 1999, when Brazil's web was still small enough that a single site could be an entire generation's introduction to a genre. It was a shock site. It collected photographs and video of real death, mostly traffic accidents and the autopsy table, and it kept a second inventory running alongside that one: horror stories and photographs of what were supposed to be ghosts. The two sat on the same index with nothing marking which material was documentary and which was invented.

What made the name stick was the Mamonas Assassinas. The band died in a Learjet crash on the Serra da Cantareira in March 1996, three years before the site existed, and Assustador published explicit photographs of the bodies. In a country where that crash was a national event, publishing those pictures was enough to turn a hobby page into a destination. Ayrton Senna and Carmen Miranda had pages too, as did Kurt Cobain, Elvis Presley and Mother Teresa. The single image people describe most often was not of anyone famous: a girl in a corridor, apparently floating, white-eyed, holding a teddy bear.

It was also a business. The domain was registered to Gilson Cariry Campos and it charged two hundred reais a day to run an advertisement in a pop-up window. In February 2004 it counted 16,899,217 visits in a single month, which for a Portuguese-language site with no company behind it was a serious number. Orkut, then the social network of record in Brazil, carried communities with thousands of members who did nothing but argue about what was currently on it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the warning page ~

You never landed on the content. You landed on a black page with white Verdana on it, and its text was more careful than anything behind it. Only over-eighteens should view what followed. People with heart problems, or who could not handle strong emotions, should not view it either. Most of the material had been taken from elsewhere on the internet, so the site claimed neither responsibility nor copyright, and would remove anything on request from its author. Then the last line: se após ter lido nosso aviso ainda quiser entrar, clique na imagem acima. If after reading our warning you still want to enter, click the image above.

I was on Turkish dial-up through the same years and the genre reached me the way it reached everybody, as links passed around with no context attached. But those links went to the English-language sites. Assustador was in Portuguese, its dead were Brazilian, and the famous corpses on it were the ones Brazil grieved. Shock sites traveled as a genre and not as products. There was never a reason for this one to cross into Turkish.

~ the IML photos ~

In January 2007 the Diário do Grande ABC reported that Assustador was hosting necropsy photographs from the Instituto Médico Legal in Santo André. The pictures were not of the dead alone. They showed living people posing beside opened bodies inside the institute, and they had been taken without authorization during academic visits. Vladimir Reis, who ran the IML, opened an internal inquiry and suspended student visits. He also filed a police report for usurpação de trabalho público.

The photographs came down as soon as the newspaper reached the owner. Campos answered by email that the process was simple, and that if anyone asked, relative or friend, they did it immediately. No charge was brought against him. The story ran once, and the site went on operating for another eight years.

~ the day it stopped answering ~

Portuguese Wikipedia puts the end somewhere in the 2000s decade, and that is wrong. The archive shows content folders dated 2012 still returning images in October 2013, and the anomalias gallery still serving in June 2014. The front page answered for the last time on 21 March 2015. By 17 May the domain was returning an empty redirect, and it has answered nothing since.

There was no announcement and no final post. A site that had taken 16.8 million visits in its best month simply stopped paying for itself, some years after the audience it built moved to video platforms willing to host the same material with a play button on it. Assustador belonged to the era when shocking you took a hyperlink and a click-through, and it did not survive the era when it took nothing at all.

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