‘Salad Fingers’ Is Back To Haunt Your Nightmares Once Again

2004 on the internet was a strange time: Facebook had only just become a thing, Youtube was still a year off, and an animated flash cartoon called Salad Fingers was horrifying teenagers worldwide.

Back then, watching Salad Fingers (not to be confused with hand salad) became a kind of adolescent trial by fire; a way friends could test each other’s mettles at a sleepover, long after their parents had gone to sleep.

Well, after five years off at The Great War, Salad Fingers is back and ready to traumatise a whole new generation of internet users.

The oozing, high-voiced brainchild of English animator David Firth, the titular Salad Fingers is a weedly, green-skinned sociopath, who can alternate between lilting, innocent nothings and sudden, fang-baring tantrums.

Accompanied by a small army of finger puppets, chiefly the sweet Hubert Cumberdale and the deeply disturbing Jeremy Fisher, Fingers spends his time wandering a deserted, post-apocalyptic wasteland, and getting involved in elliptical, frequently nonsensical adventures.

Ten episodes dropped across the initial online run of the series, with the finale closing with David Firth’s version of a cliffhanger; Fingers dressing himself in a BBQ apron and staring glassy-eyed into the middle distance, while atmospheric, melancholy music plays.

The new eleventh episode, created with the help of a shedload of loyal patrons, sees Fingers getting up to his old nonsense; chewing off Marjory Stewart-Baxter’s hair, sewing together clumps of suspiciously human-looking skin, being berated by a long-fingered old woman, and mixing together horrendous potions.

there's a new salad fingers and 12 year old me is fucking screaming

— Addy✨? (@AddyPrior) January 30, 2019

But it also features some disturbing, canon-altering plot twists (all the stuff with the mirror! The deeply horrifying, oddly emotional finale!) It is, in short, a perfect episode of Salad Fingers, a show that has been gone for far too long in our lives.

Now let’s just hope we don’t have to wait another five years for the next episode.