I came to say this, I remember faces of death being weirdly real, maybe not popular, but definitely known about, and not as niché as one would expect.
Documentingreality was one of the site I use to visit, and never really got bothered until I aged more and I guess more of my frontal lobe formed to be like, "yo, this is sick as fuck dude" also believe alot of the serial murderers kinda did that alittle to much at younger age, got alittle to desensitized, and eventually progressively started to act out extremely fucked up things.
Faces of death, bestgore, documentingreality were all thing that go back at least a decade or more, (faces of death as you've said literally had VHS tapes lol).
Ive seen some extremely fucked up things, like on par with the Japanese torture stuff back in WW2/Holocaust experiments, that are basically happening daily, that have probably made me realize just how fucking terrifying some people can be, and that a lot of these people in those videos doing the brutality live "normal 9-5's" and just had a victim aside from the usual cartel victim videos just as disturbing.
It's also disturbing exactly just how long or how much it can sometimes take for the human body to give up, even while you're praying for death but biological evolution is still trying to keep you alive.
Humans truly have a capacity to do some extremely,
extremely, fucked up, things. The human mind is a beautiful, yet can also be disturbing thing.
I'm sorry, and I will say I cannot watch those things anymore without truly feeling, I don't know, just not fucking comfortable, really really uncomfortable.
What the fuck was wrong with me to even see those things I'll never know, just glad I have too much empathy now as I've aged