I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cringe when I first saw the photos: a guy lying face down at a driving range, his friend poised to tee off on his back; a kid riding an up escalator lying face down; a couple stacked on a table in sort of an inert dry-humping pose.

These were among the more banal of the photos posted on the Facebook page called The Lying Down Game, a sensation that started as an in-joke between a group of British pals who decided they’d had it with the traditional way of posing for photos (that is, standing up). Instead, they decided to play dead in public places, have their pictures taken, and then post the images on a Facebook page dedicated to their new hobby. It’s sort of a funny idea. Sort of. But it’s taken off in a major way — the last time I looked, 43,109 members had posted 9,933 photos and 15 videos (including the Escalator Challenge series).

The concept first titillated the Brits, then Europeans at large, and eventually, all of Facebookdom. As it spread, the photos began skewing exotic –  face plants in front of the Tower of Pisa, the Taj Mahal, the Hungarian Parliament in Budapest, and the Egyptian Pyramids. There’s even a sector of extremists — people who recline on the railings of boats, the tops of chimneys, and mountains. “9,000 feet up Dachstein Mountain Austria playing lying down game lol,” wrote Naomi Claire Boyne in one photo caption. It seems  a world-traveler-smackdown of sorts is under way among participants.

When you see how basic a premise the “game” is, you assume that there are no rules. Not so fast.

Rule Number One is that you must lie down in the most public place possible (Times Square, presumably, would be the New York City ideal; a street in Shenzhen, China, or a rickshaw in Delhi would be best if you’re gonna get really hardcore about it). Rule Number Two, which channels the flash mob phenomena that peaked circa 2003, is that as many people as possible should lie down with you (this rule usually goes ignored; the vast majority of players are for some reason lone rangers).

The more preposterous the setting, obviously, the funnier the effect: On the roof of a Fed Ex truck, in a tree. Two of the best are a woman lying down on the luggage rack inside a moving train and an airport employee embedded in the well of a jet engine.

But many of the photos have a strong whiff of the macabre — a trio lying down in the street in a crosswalk on what looks like Abbey Road at first appears nostalgic, and then the bodies start to look like corpses. The liers-down who are only partially captured by the photographer, too, resemble dead bodies, as do some of the ones perched partly on their heads. (The ones in cemeteries, ironically, are among the least morbid.)

The overall effect of skimming the Facebook gallery is that of traveling the globe and flipping through exotic crime scene photos — and the best of the bunch, as far as I’m concerned, accomplish both at once, allowing for both a laugh and a cringe.

Photos by Now Taken Out and David Vizek

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