A spectre is haunting the internet: you might find it lurking on Instagram, or Twitter, or simply in the darkest corners of your subconscious.
It could manifest itself as a vague blur in the corner of your eye or a feeling of nameless dread that you can’t quite shake.
It might be a soft scratching outside your bedroom door as you awake from uneasy dreams.
We’re referring, of course, to the long Furby, an unholy variation of the half-owl, half-hamster robotic toy that was hugely popular in the late 1990’s, and has now returned to wreak a terrible revenge.
If you’ve never heard of long Furbies before then count yourself lucky and stop reading this article now. Please, we beg you. Get out while you still can.
If you’re still reading, on your own head be it.
Metro.co.uk spoke to one of the people responsible for unleashing this evil onto the world.
Devin Gardner is a 24-year-old from Los Angeles who runs ‘long.furby.fam’, an Instagram account dedicated to long Furbies.
He creates these himself by taking existing Furbies, removing their faces and feet, and then sewing together a grotesquely extended new body. The results are both impressive in their creativity and absolutely terrifying – like if Dr Frankenstein ran an Etsy store.
‘I think there’s always been something inherently creepy about Furbies, even back in the 1990’s before the recent revival,’ he says. ‘Everyone I know has a story about owning one as a child, and how unsettling they were.’
While Devin didn’t start the long Furby craze, he is largely responsible for the twisted direction it’s taken.
‘My account has definitely taken a plunge into “cursed content” more than I ever expected. If you look back to some of the earlier posts, they’re relatively tame,’ he says.
‘The more cursed the content became, the more cursed I aspired to make the next post. At this point, it’s become a personal competition to see how far I can push the limit.’
And push the limit he certainly has: the account is filled with a genuinely unsettling aura of dread.
These Furbies are blood-drenched and murderous. They weave webs to catch their prey. They lay eggs and give birth.
They have long, skeletal spines which protrude from their fur, usually at moments of violent rupture.
But for Devin, there’s some light amidst the dark.
‘As unsettling as some of the content is, I feel there’s a strange tone of wholesomeness underneath that resonates with people. My long Furby “family” goes on plenty of bizarre adventures.
‘They might bully one other from time to time,’ he says, presumably referring to the posts in which the Furbies flay each others fur and leave each other for dead, ‘but at the end of the day they’re all having fun as a group of oddball friends.’
Having learned to sew especially to create long Furbies, running the account is now Devin’s full-time job.
(Picture: @long.furby.fam/Instagram)
Not all fans of long Furbies are quite so devoted to the grotesque as Devin. One online seller, Megan Hicks, who posts under ‘MadHatterPlushies’, sees their appeal quite differently.
Megan says: ‘Although I do think long Furbies have a spooky vibe, I mostly love how wholesome the community is and the culture around customizing them.
‘For me, it’s about how much people love them, the way they name them and make up personalities and stories. That’s what makes them cute to me, rather than their actual appearance.’
Ultimately, whether you consider long Furbies adorable or menacing, the popularity of the trend speaks to the internet’s resurgent desire for ‘cursed’ content – that is, things which are strange, eerie, and not quite of this world.
Although this craze for the ‘cursed’ might have spiked in popularity recently, it speaks to an age-old human impulse.
As cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote: ‘We could go so far as to say that it is the human condition to be grotesque, since the human animal is the one that does not fit in, the freak of nature who has no place in the natural order and is capable of re-combining nature’s products into hideous new forms.’
He might have been talking about long Furbies, although he wasn’t.
In an internet culture which has become increasingly sanitised, commercialised and ruled by monopolies, it’s nice that there are corners of the web still dedicated to being really f**king weird purely for its own sake.
It all seems refreshingly free of cynicism: no-one gets involved in the long Furby scene for social clout and the people involved are unlikely to be doing any corporate partnerships any time soon.
In fact, it represents a kind of anti-aspirationalism: posting a picture of a spider Furby with skeleton hands is about as far removed from a beach selfie as it’s possible to get. The level of creativity on display is also admirable.
But that said, I still would round up every single one of these foul creatures, burn them in a fire and then salt the earth so they might never return. Keep them the hell away from me.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2019/11/21/long-furbies-the-horrifying-trend-haunting-the-internets-nightmares-10948565/
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