‘Running the Gauntlet’: The Internet’s Most Disgusting Challenge

The film is grainy, but it’s not hard to see what’s going on: An adult woman is submerged in a bathtub except for her legs and feet. Her wrists are shackled in tight handcuffs, held beneath her outstretched legs, and her face is obscured as she writhes around in the water, trying to free herself.

As she struggles, her legs quiver and tense, a supposed effect of oxygen deprivation to which she is rapidly succumbing. As the video goes on, the woman becomes increasingly panicked, splashing harder until suddenly—stillness. Presumably, the woman is dead: a Harry Houdini maneuver gone horribly wrong.

On message boards, the video has largely been deemed a fake, a hyperrealistic hoax for some fetish site (detractors of the video are quick to call out the stilettoed boots and the red panties that the stuntwoman is wearing). Nevertheless, it’s one of the most haunting videos featured on Run The Gauntlet (The Daily Beast is not linking to the site’s address), a website which heralds itself as the custodian of “the most vile, puke-inducing, hard-to-watch videos on the Internet.”