Funky Town

Fiction: A grim video and a catchy song in the depths of the information superhighway.

This short story is part of our October horror collection, Future Weird, beyond the pale of what we publish the rest of the year. Reader discretion is advised.

“Gotta make a move to a town that's right for me.”—Lipps Inc.

It started after another night on r/CartelViolence, another night contemplating the fate of the victim in the Funky Town video and why it happened to him. I will describe this video for you so you don’t try to find it. A man lies bound on a white ceramic floor in a pool of blood. His hands are cut down to stumps, his eyes gouged out, and all the skin flayed from his face leaving just bone and tissue. He has been strung up with a synthetic adrenaline drip to keep him alive and maximally conscious through all of this, and alive and maximally conscious he is: screaming in agony and gargling blood. One of the murderers works at his neck with a box cutter, careful not to hit anything vital that would bring his suffering to an end. At some point the man gets the stumps of his hand free and tries to bring them to his no-longer-existent face. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses plays ambiently in the background, and later: “Funky Town.” The video cuts out after two minutes and fifty seconds. Some say a longer version exists somewhere on the dark web, but I have never been able to find it.

Everyone agrees that the video was recorded by a Mexican drug cartel or street gang, but no one knows which one, who the victim was, or why he was tortured. Theories abound on the back-pages of Reddit, however, with the Zetas, the CJNG and La Familia Michoacána all variously blamed. A popular narrative holds that the victim raped one of the perpetrator’s sisters, but if you ask me this is a comforting myth. Much worse to suppose it was a kidnapped migrant or police officer, God forbid a tourist or civilian. Even if it was an informant or member of a rival gang—as is most likely the case— he was probably just a poor avocado farmer who realized he could get paid a bit more to carry a gun.

We in the US fuss too much about who’s doing what in the Middle East and not nearly enough about the power struggle going on just south of us. Did you see what happened when they tried to arrest El Chapo’s son? Talk about legitimately contested space, talk about a state not having a monopoly on violence. I think that only such a struggle could produce a video like Funky Town. Sadistic psychopaths can be found everywhere, to be sure, but Funky Town was clearly made with purpose. Like an ISIS beheading video, it sends a strong message about what happens when you stand against these guys.

The most disturbing element—out of so many to choose from—is the synthetic adrenaline drip. A use of medical technology to enhance agony, crueler than anything found in nature by magnitudes and as human as one of Beethoven’s symphonies. It forces one to consider the unpleasant question of where biomedical technology might potentially bring torture and suffering in the future.

I saw the video for the first time in early 2017, at a middle school sleepover. My head was swimming from a joint my friends and I had just passed around, and my heart pounded as I stared into the raw face of human agony, my understanding of the potential depths of such agony stretching to include new demonic vistas. I couldn’t sleep for days, couldn’t stop the video from playing in my head. For months I’d think I was over the trauma and then “Funky Town” or “Sweet Child O’ Mine” would come on the radio and the terror would come flooding back. Other times I’d be hanging out with friends or talking to a teacher and be struck with the disruptive thought of what they’d look like with their face flayed off, bound to a ceramic floor, writhing with nothing but the desire for suffering to cease. This potential human fate that I wish I didn’t know was a possibility that we’re all theoretically hours from experiencing if we got on the wrong people’s bad side.

I didn’t revisit Funky Town until about a year ago. It was as bad as I’d remembered, but I was able to watch it this time with a clearer head. I began to study such gore videos as primary examples of the novelty produced by the internet. Such violent content—like extreme pornography—stimulates us in a way that humans aren’t necessarily supposed to be stimulated, showing us potential facets of the human experience that none but the most degraded or unfortunate specimens would have considered just decades ago.

The man in Funky Town’s fate is 5-6 steps down from the worst fates most of us can imagine for ourselves. Like 5-6 steps down from the Hanged Man Tarot Card. This was the thought that unlocked the idea for me, tarot being a fixation of mine introduced to me by an ex-girlfriend a few years ago. The image of Funky Town’s flayed face became the first and most horrific card in an at-first theoretical and now real digital tarot deck, harvesting the worst and most provocative images and archetypes brought to us by the world wide web.

Killdozer, Three Men One Hammer, the Kim Kardashian sex tape. Name the shock video, morbid online reference point, or viral pornography and it is in my deck, arranged like the original tarot in a rich cycle of meaning. Together, I think these images and memes comprise the vocabulary of the new frontier of human psychic stimulation. A set of alchemical ingredients with explosive volitional and divinatory power. I am working with a tarot master to develop a game with this deck that can usher in the end times, itself based on an esoteric game he invented with the original Waite deck called Stairway to Heaven. DM me if you’re interested in the deck and to hear more about what it is capable of.

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Matt Pegas is the author of Dragon Day and The Black Album, and is one half of the New Write podcast.

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