It was Genecyst that had the bloody menus.
Back in the day, we didn't really worry about software like this being malicious just because of the author's gruesome sense of humor. It was all part of the fun. Back in the 90s, people were edgy like that. It's not like today where you're suspected of cryptofascism for not properly reciting the right nostrums. If it were malicious, someone would've found out, word would have spread around the scene, and the author would be branded the worst of lamers. People had reputations to uphold and good will to farm out of the community, even when running quasi-legal programs to play pirated ROMs.
There was a lot less incentive to be malicious. No crypto-mining on compromised devices, no ransomware, and limited Internet banking
Source: I made a lot of money between the ages of 12-15 running HijackThis and Spybot Search and Destroy on neighbors' machines.
Other source: circumvented my school's firewall with "anonymous proxies" on lists of what, in hindsight, were absolutely compromised machines.
There's a certain irony in the fact this is exactly how it works today.
I guess the difference is back then you were in on "the right nostrums", some people likely weren't and felt just as alienated by that scene as you do by today's...
The Android PS2 emulation drama is hilarious (and sad). For the most part a lot of the modern drama is around money, it seems?
The emu scene still has lots of drama, but it's different and I won't get into why on Hackernews.
EDIT: In fact Damaged Cybernetics, which was indeed the group to go to for emulation news and information back in the day, was disbanded because of the backlash against its leader, who had the friendly nick "MindRape". MindRape stole and released the source code to... NESticle, leading to Sardu's withdrawal from the scene and the lack of a SNESticle we can all enjoy.