alt Hacker NewsI have always actively avoided all the videos online of beheadings or other types of death, because i'm squeamish and don't want such images in my head. However, while not in person, I did actually witness a guillotine execution video. Admittedly it was filmed at a few hundred feet away, so it lacked any gore or closeups of the corpse. It was a shocking process - how quickly it happened (30 seconds from the appearance of the condemned to their demise). But it wasn't too hard to watch, and hasn't haunted me.
Anyway, there are a great many videos online of murders and other death scenes, and famously there were VHS tapes available pre-internet called "faces of death" showing such events. A great many people actively seek out and watch such things, seemingly with no negative reaction to them. So there are a lot of people who would presumably be even less affected by a guillotine execution than I was.
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I mean, hangings and torture used to be done publicly and people would gather to watch in large crowds, even bringing the whole family. There are still people who travel to witness death-row executions for no apparent reason than their own pleasure. This kind of morbid obsession with violence and trivialization of it as a spectacle has become much less common as people have become more civilized with time, but I doubt it will ever fully disappear.