A photograph of an attraction allegedly built for people who want to die has been circulated on the Internet. We checked whether such slides actually exist.

A photograph allegedly depicting a “death attraction” was posted, in particular, on the Telegram channel "Film" with 190,000 subscribers. The authors report that "this roller coaster was specifically designed to make death painless and easy." The mechanism of action of the unusual attraction is as follows: the trolley rises to a height of about 500 m, then descends sharply, passing through several loops of decreasing size. As a result, the body experiences overloads that are incompatible with life, the person loses consciousness, and his brain stops functioning due to lack of oxygen.

In 2011, at an exhibition in Dublin there was presented Euthanasia Corner project. Its author, Lithuanian designer and engineer Julionas Urbonas, was then receiving a PhD at the Royal College of Art in London and worked on the study “Gravitational Aesthetics”. According to the project, the height of the attraction was supposed to be 500 m, the length - 7.5 km, and as a result of a trip on it, a person would die from cerebral hypoxia and lack of oxygen in the brain. For the exhibition, Urbonas made a 1:500 scale model of this unusual roller coaster.

If you compare the model presented by Urbonas and the photograph distributed, it is easy to notice their difference. Firstly, in this photo there is no half-kilometer “drive”, without which the idea proposed by the engineer would not work. Secondly, even if this part of the attraction was left behind the scenes, the loops, according to the project, should noticeably decrease in diameter, but in the photograph they are approximately the same (although due to the angle it does not seem so). Moreover, Urbonas emphasizes, that his project was only a hypothetical roller coaster and he had no intention of building it.

The photo, which some are touting as the embodiment of Urbonas' project, is a still from a short film H Positive. Inspired by the idea of the Lithuanian designer, director Glenn Paton in 2015 made a film about a rich man who learned that he was dying and decided to implement Urbonas' project for subsequent euthanasia. Footage of the slides (including those distributed on social networks) was filmed at an amusement park in Madrid. How explained Paton, with the help of computer effects, several loops were added to the selected Superman attraction, and the slide itself was “repainted” in dark colors.