Horsemaning Is The Ultimate Macabre Meme – The Dark Art Of Pretending To Be Decapitated
Hello everyone. Let’s talk about horsemaning – yes, the meme where people pretend to be decapitated for the sheer joy of unsettling their grandmother and confusing any poor soul scrolling their feed. Imagine planking, but with added historical baggage, a dash of Victorian creepiness, and just enough Halloween overtones to make you question humanity’s collective sense of humour.
The Premise: Because Normal Portraits Are Boring
The shtick is straightforward: Two people team up in the pursuit of ridiculousness. One plays the “body,” carefully positioned so that the neck is artfully missing from shot. The other plays the “head,” lounging on the edge of a table or buried up to the ears in sand. Cue camera shutter, upload, and voilà – you are now a macabre dinner conversation starter. It works because it’s very obviously fake, much like a bad boss fight mechanic you can see coming from a mile away… but you still get hit by it because you’re too busy laughing.
Why It’s Called Horsemaning
The term comes from “The Headless Horseman” – that literary icon who lost his noggin in an 1820s tale and has been haunting our cultural consciousness every Halloween since. He’s basically the original cosplayer of ‘I misplaced my head, please return to Lost & Found.’ Once again, proof that human beings have been entertained by the same silly shock-value tricks for centuries; we’ve just upgraded from parchment to pixels.
Tracing It Further Back: The Victorians Were Weird
Before the internet – and even before the horror of dial-up connections – Victorians were already staging headless portraits. Between pioneering photographic techniques, overexposure, superimpositions, and the occasional multi-negative party trick, people found ways to enjoy “sans tête” aesthetics. This was the nineteenth-century version of modding your own camera filters – minus the Instagram influencer nonsense, plus a touch of aristocratic morbidity. It’s the sort of quirk you’d see in a point-and-click adventure game where the clue is hidden under a severed head prop.
The Comeback Era: Facebook’s Wild Youth
Fast forward to when Facebook was still tolerable – the golden years when everyone engaged in online fads while pretending we weren’t just collectively bored. Horsemaning returned alongside other viral nonsense like stocking (recreating stock photos), planking (lying face down in absurd places), owling (perching like a nocturnal predator), plowling (some Frankenstein merger of planking and owling), and batmanning (hanging upside-down for extra points). This was pre-TikTok, back when random strangers weren’t dancing in every grocery store aisle, and there was a certain innocence to sacrificing your dignity for internet points.
The Verdict: Comedy or Cry for Help?
Here’s the thing – horsemaning is both stupid and brilliant, much like a JRPG side quest that feels objectively pointless but you somehow enjoy way too much. It’s harmless, absurd, and oddly endearing. Sure, it’s a gimmick, but at least it’s a gimmick that doesn’t involve hawking shady crypto tokens or starting arguments in the comments section.
On my diagnostic chart, this sits firmly between “light viral fun” and “questionable artistic choices.” Definitely worth a laugh, but best experienced sparingly – like that one level in a game you don’t replay because, yes, it was fun, but also, it is not worth grinding through the same nonsense twice.
Overall impression? Good-natured silliness with more cultural lineage than you’d expect from people faking their own beheadings. Takes the crown in the ‘low-stakes internet idiocy’ category.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is entirely my opinion.
Article source: El primer meme fotográfico de la historia era extremadamente macabro: posar como cadáveres decapitados, https://www.xataka.com/fotografia-y-video/primer-meme-fotografico-historia-era-extremadamente-macabro-posar-como-cadaveres-decapitados
