The art of colorizing old photos — adding color to black-and-white photos that previously had none — involves a lot more guesswork than people realize. Not just guesswork of which colors to use, but guesswork about how exactly the images might have looked if they were taken in color to begin with.


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That’s exactly what happened to one photo featuring Grigori Rasputin, the guy from the Boney M song and the Russian royal family. The photo, which shows Rasputin surrounded by the Tsar’s children and standing next to Princess Alix, was originally taken in black and white, and somewhere along the way, has been colorized to disturbing results.



Rasputin was famously a weird guy. There’s an entire kids’ movie featuring him as the villain, complete with a bat sidekick, and the reality wasn’t much better. He claimed to be able to treat young Alexei’s hemophilia, and while the royal family believed in his abilities as a faith healer, he was viewed by many as a charlatan and a con artist. He’s perhaps best known for his death. The most popular account of his death, shared in the memoirs of one of his killers, says that Rasputin survived ingesting poisoned cakes and wine and a gunshot before eventually being killed by a second gunshot.



Anyway, back to the colorized image. It shows Rasputin with his eyes wide open and looking away from the camera, seeming incredibly alarmed and haunting and out of place surrounded by smiling Russian royals. After the OP shared the black-and-white original, which looks slightly less haunting, Twitter users suggested that the issue was the colorist misinterpreting Rasputin’s eyelids, or otherwise coloring his eyes strangely to make them particularly shocking and strange.


Perhaps the colorist was a fan of the royal family and wanted to take revenge on Rasputin the only way they knew how.


Whatever the reason, the result will now haunt our nightmares for years to come.