My Friends Is Showing Concerning Behaviors

Okay, so I have this friend who I've known for years and he's always had some... strange things about him to say the least. In elementary and middle school he always talked about horror films and true crime and such, which I thought was cool because I was never allowed to see horror films or watch the news in my household.

This is sort of why I became friends with him in the first place, but he always had a darker edge to his interests. I specifically remember an instance where he stepped on the head of a bird that was laying on the ground with a broken wing, crushing its skull and killing it, when we were about 10 years old which honestly sort of traumatized me. He would always draw pictures of and talk about violence and the macabre.

Around middle school/high school he started getting into shadier parts of the internet where he frequently watched and shared gore videos with me. I was disgusted by most of them, but I sort of faked interest because I didn't want to hurt his feelings by ignoring him. Mind you, he wasn't showing me these to shock me, he just had a fascination with the videos and watched them in his free time.

More recently he has gotten into Telegram and other private messaging services where he talks with other weirdos and once showed me an animal torture video that I still can't get out of my head because it showed kittens getting tortured and killed. I'm a cat lover and I couldn't deal with that. People on those groups do crazy shit.

Whenever we talk about girls, he sometimes alludes to violence as well. We were talking about sex and stuff and he told me how he wanted to choke a girl to unconsciousness.

I have always shrugged him off as an edgelord, but he has started to seriously disturb me and other friends recently. Could this escalate? Will he grow out of it? Should I distance myself?