Please don't list this on a work's page as a trope. Examples can go on the work's YMMV tab.
Accidental Nightmare Fuel: Advertising
Please note that this page and all other Accidental Nightmare Fuel pages are intended for examples that WERE NOT meant to be scary by the maker of the media form. If it was intended to be scary, then it goes under High Octane Nightmare Fuel
Some advertising companies use facts and some clever images to entice us to buy their products. Other companies, by contrast, end up scaring the living crap out of children.
Another common way to wind up on this page is a Dada Ad with an unintended side-effect of scaring the bejeezus out of viewers, or a Design Student's Orgasm that strayed too far from selling a product.
Advertisements
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Food Ads
The recent Joe's Crab Shack commercials where some guys say they're going to eat some greasy fast food..and then a giant, realistic crab claw comes out of nowhere to damage some property and convince them to eat its smaller brethren at Joe's. "Obey the claw", or else.
A recent advert for Muller Yogurts shows a boring traffic warden in a grey city being consumed by some transformer turned clown-monster and then vomited back out as a cartoon bear, who, apparently now brainwashed to obey its new master, helps wage war on the rest of the city with brightly-coloured fruit, turning the citizens, even as they are cowering behind their briefcases, into hideously warped and deformed cartoon characters, completely against their will. It finishes by saying that this is wonderful, apparently not cottoning onto how completely like Brave New World this all is.
A Marmite commercial parodying The Blob was intended to be over-the-top and comical, but terrified children and ended up being banned.
This Birdseye commercial features a polar bear sitting in a freezer talking calmly to a woman about how the fish fingers in her freezer are substandard and finishing by saying "I'm watching you."
Rupaul's face at 0:12 as he says "YEAH!" is rather creepy.
That's actually a parody short film by late NYC filmmaker Tom Rubnitz, who also did "Strawberry Shortcut" (another short film in the same vein). It's subjective whether this is to be considered "nightmare fuel" or a charming, entertaining, totally camp little tidbit of visual joy.
Also, the film normally doesn't look like it came out of a 20-year-old videotape.
The Alpha-Bits commercial with the screaming letters.
There was an advert for Maxibon ice cream bars that featured a guy turning into a polar bear.
A commercial for the ice cream called Winner Taco, in which the guy who eats it turns into a polar bear.
Wilkins Coffee commercials. Good news: They are quite possibly Kermit the Frog's debut. Bad News: Several of the commercials feature him killing another puppet for having a negative opinion of the product. Here a collection of evidence piece:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ky7g1lgTwc
The recent ad campaigns for Pop Tarts and Chips Ahoy are quite disturbing, what with people actively hunting the obviously sentient food in a manner that borders on sadistic. One commercial in particular, in which a girl invites a giant cookie with a face to her birthday party, is unsettling.
"Where's the cake?" "We don't have any cake..." "...Uh-oh.")
The Chips Ahoy commercial with the cookies singing "Don't You Want Me Baby?" is disturbing. Here we have the cookies: happy, carefree, driving in their open-topped car along the California coastline—only for a giant, monstrous hand to reach down and snatch them, one-by-one, out of the car. Until only the driver remains. He suddenly realizes that he's the only one left singing...before he's snatched himself.
Eggo waffles also had fruit-filling-people (with families) happily whistling on the way to work in the morning before ambushed and devoured by waffle monsters in their cars or mailboxes or the like. The waffle monsters are left fatter and satisfied.
Remember another Eggo commercial where a girl talking to her dolly still has Eggo waffles on her plate while her brother tries to steal them? She reacts by turning into a Medusa-esque monster and screaming, in a deep voice reminiscent of The Clown with the Tear-Away Face (after he takes his face off in the opening song) from The Nightmare Before Christmas, "GET AWAY FROM MY EGGO!" and her older brother gapes in shock. Afterwards, she just acts all lovely as though she didn't do anything bad. Youtube video
A recent ad for Sunfresh Tomatoes decries the idea that squeezing a tomato will give you a hint as to its freshness and flavor. Which it does with a "parody" of a wartime hospital, complete with tomato juice "blood" squirting everywhere and loud, agonized screams from the damaged produce...
Even happy anthropomorphised food isn't great. Vegetables singing "Roll me over in the Clover" (for Clover butter)? Please, no.
Anyone remember that Pocket Plate commercial with that disturbingly realistic talking pizza?
Yes. Let's not forget that creepy singing fork and spoon from the Zoo Pal plate adds...
In Australia there was an ad for Twisties (a cheese flavoured snack food) that featured a man getting a packet of Twisties out of a vending machine, eating one and then suddenly finding himself inside the vending machine (with a lot of other miniaturised people). A giant packet of Twisties purchases him from the vending machine and proceeds to eat him. The man then snaps back to the real world and proceeds to eat his Twisties as if nothing had happened. ("Twisties. Now with added crack" was a joke that did the rounds at the time.)
Don't forget that the guy then pulls a human out of the packet.
Two words: The Noid. A few people freaked out when they saw the old Dominoes Pizza ads with the Noid in them.
An old ketchup commercial which had a female narrator, speaking in a slow echo, about suffocating french fries with ketchup. Yes that's the perfect imagery for eating, killing something by pouring red liquid all over it.......ick.
The Honey Monster, mascot of Sugar Puffs. Particularly the advert where a classroom of children turn into Honey Monsters.
There's a reason the Monster Munch crisps are called "Monster Munch"; one of the ads had kids eat the crisps and turn into monsters.
The "Hunger strikes" advert for "Frosted Shreddies" features a scary but at the same time comical character called Hungar who was a blue genie like thing with a tendency to try and steal someone's cereal in a way similar to how the trix rabbit always tried to steal Trix cereal and how The Noid always tried to ruin pizza.
There's one Fruit Loops advert which has a guy turning into Toucan Sam, and then there's another one where Sam appears to be turned into some sort of weretoucan.
Chef Boyardee is currently using an ad where children turn into monsters ("beasts") that can only be tamed once they get the yumminess of canned ravioli. Apparently even the company realized that this was creepy. The original version featured frightening music straight out of a horror movie, in a camp setting, with a rather terrifying-looking monster.
That creepy mid-90's ad for Rice Krispies Treats. These two kids are sitting on the curb and one of them opens said product and eats it slowly, savoring it, while his friend watches and lusts after it. This goes on for a while until the deprived kid loses it, his face turning into a freaky claymation, screaming "I WAAAAANT ONE!" I was about five and it scared the bejeezus out of me.
The Australian ad for Ingham's Chicken Munchies (or something of the like, they're KFC's 'popcorn chicken') featured one of said munchies coming to life in stop motion, going "mmm, chicken!" and then devouring a whole roast chicken in under a second, leaving only the bones. When the family catch him, he points at the cat and says "The cat did it!" and attempts to look innocent.
The Mike's Hard Lemonade commercials from the late '90s in which a guy grows a second, evil head.
What makes it creepier is that you have no idea what message that slogan is trying to convey. Either it's the shortest Patrick Stewart Speech in the history of speeches, or it's a very subtle way of saying "Get the hell out."
A commercial for Hillshire Farms has what looks like a Looney Tunes ending sequence. Only, instead of Porky Pig doing his famous sign off, you get a message saying "Only the best ingredients are used in Hillshire Farms' products." Enjoying your B-b-b-b-bacon, Timmy?
A new ad for Tabasco features the sauce being drizzled on a slice of pizza with four pepperoni slices on it. They promptly sprout human faces and begin singing a la a barbershop quartet, asking you to try Tabasco on your pizza soon.
"This message brought to you by Tobasco... Sleep tight."
Somebody apparently thought it was a good idea to have Kellogg's Raisin Bran Crunch be advertised by a cross between the Alien and Pumpkinhead, who despite his soft-spoken mannerisms and British accent still manages to be pretty damn freaky. Watch here.
There's a KFC ad running right now that shows a family with three sons, presumably identical triplets. They wear the exact same clothes, their rooms look exactly the same, at a costume party they wear the exact same costume. Then when they get KFC, they get the variety because "not everybody's the same". The fact that these kids are forced to live identical lives is unsettling. Emphasis on "forced". Throughout the commercial all three of them look depressed and upset, while their parents have unnervingly bright grins.
As a general rule of thumb, commercials from the 60's/70's tend to be a little creepier than they were intended to be. For example, this IHOP commercial is a day-ruiner. It's only a minute long, but it seems to stretch on for days.
A recent Cinnamon Toast Crunch commercial consists of three pieces of the cereal eyeing each other and licking the cinnamon off of each other. Two of them then proceed to slice the other in half and devour him.
In either the same commercial or a variant, but there's a version here that's even creepier, where the two halfs of the buzzsawed piece pull themselves together and eat the other two at the same time... is this the ceral for The Thing or what?
The latest commercial? A single piece of CTC licks itself. And then starts to eat itself from the feet(?) up, finally devouring its own mouth. Are they marketing to vorephiles now?
This Cheetos commercial, which has little to do with Cheetos and looks like a scene out of a very trippy horror movie. Good luck getting any sleep the next time you're on a plane.
This ad for Yoplait yogurt. Sure, it's supposed to be happy and upbeat, with its FREAKY FRUIT GETTING PEELED IN UNCANNY VALLEY WAYS, REVEALING NEW FREAKY FRUIT HIDDEN IN THEIR HOLLOW SHELL! IT'S LIKE SOMETHING OUT OF ALIENS!!! AUGH!
A 1993 ad for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese had this kid, when eating a bowl a macaroni, mutated his face into a scary-but-funny face with freaky noises that gives you the creeps.
A commercial for Campbell's Chicken and Stars Soup (I think) has a shot of the stars bouncing around the spiral arms of a galaxy (presumably the Milky Way), going closer and closer to the center. This seems like nothing unless you know that spiral galaxies have supermassive black holes in their centers, meaning that those stars are falling to their doom!
Hostess did a series of commercials in the 90s that featured an animal approaching something that appeared to be a Hostess snack product, but wasn't, and would prompt that animal to ask "Hey, where's the cream filling?" However, the creepiest ad involves a boy teasing a doll with a toy cupcake, which prompts her to come to life with one hell of a angry face. Can be found here at about 1:05.
The woman in this old "Heart of Oats" commercial gets kinda creepy at the end...
Some of the Pakistan McDonald's commercials can be considered Nightmare Fuel due to their hideous animation, but the two that take the cake are The Crash Bandicoot one and the Hello Kitty one. Hello Kitty's smile at the end...just plain creepy.
The new "Pudding Face Dad" ad starts out innocently enough with the first half featuring a somewhat stereotypically attractive, spunky teenage girl scolding her dad for stealing the last of her pudding. Then when she pulls away his newspaper she discovers his "pudding face", which has a striking resemblance to a glasgow smile. Aforementioned teenage daughter merely crosses her arms and looks annoyed while the wife backs her up with the evidence. More glasgow smile pudding face. In addition to the accidental nightmare fuel, there's a bit of fridge horror (but YMMV) in the realization upon the second viewing that using sitcom tropes, the daughter behaves more like his wife while the wife behaves more like his daughter. In addition to his creepy smile, there's just something squicky about their interaction, almost kinky in an "I'm a bad boy, I should be punished" sort of way. Which would be not so bad (if not weird for a food ad) if it were the wife, but it's his daughter that looks no older than 15.
In one of the Chef Boyardee ads a young girl's talking blanket complains about how she's now too old to sleep with him any more. It might have not been so creepy if it were an age-appropriate voice, but it's clearly a thirtysomething man's voice. Fridge Horror kicks in when you realize that he may have been that "old" throughout her childhood. Then you realize that he apparently has dirt on one of the girl's friends who is pretending that she doesn't sleep with anything as childish as a blanket, as he points out that she does still sleep with something like that, and she reacts guiltily to the claim. How does the blanket know that? Does he gather around with the other blankets and stuffed animals and talk about what's going on in their masters' lives? Too freaking creepy. Unsurprisingly, this ad didn't run for long.
The ad for Pam with the muffin father and daughter duo, and their creepy little faces with berries for eyes.
This recent Lurpak ad is pretty creepy . It has a guy singing in a low, foreboding voice as we see a variety of different food being mashed and diced and cooked....but it seems so violent.
Candy Ads
Candy commercials tend to invoke this trope a lot, for reasons that re impossible to fathom. To wit:
Bonkers will flatten you with giant fruit from on high;
Gushers will turn you into a terrible mutant thing with a fruit for a head;
Made more disturbing since the candy turns people's heads into the fruit that is the flavor of the Gusher, implying that somewhere out there, there are human-flavored Gushers.
Air Heads will turn your head into a balloon and send you rocketing into the stratosphere;
Even better, there's a recent one where one kid eats an Air Heads and gets the balloon head, but doesn't blast off. The camera pans to his confused friend and his balloon head promptly EXPLODES, sending a rush of multicolored goo everywhere. His friend can't stop grinning.
Fruit Roll-Ups will turn you into a Fruit Roll-Up; we could go on for days!
A VERY recent Hershey's Kisses commercial, "Air Delight," features the famous candy cut in half, covered in holes. While this may not be terrifying for many people, trypophobia, the fear of clusters of holes, makes it FUCKING HORRYIFYING for those select phobics. Oh, and don't google trypophobia, by the way.
The popping sound that plays when the Kiss reveals it's "full of holes" is really, really bothersome. It's unnerving for some who don't even HAVE trypophobia.
Fruit by the Foot has the recent ads in which two recurring boys are playing a game, saying "I replaced your [insert] with Fruit by the Foot". Sounds innocent enough, but given that the game actually does what it says, it just goes down into the horror of one of the boys turning completely into Fruit by the Foot by the end of one ad. You have to sincerely wonder if these food companies are trying to scare their target audience away. Example: http://adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/2009/07/fruit-by-the-foot-combat-often-catastrophic.html
A recent ad seen on Nickelodeon has one of the two children announcing to the other one he has replaced his most precious memory with Fruit by the Foot. A thought balloon then comes up from the memory-altered child's mind, which has the said child's dad giving him a puppy (actually a pile of Fruit by the Foot). To some people, this could be a Tear Jerker, too.
Skittles loves this. Examples include:
Children sitting on a rainbow, eating Skittles. The mere thought of being so high with legs dangling is scary as hell. Then one child dares to ponder if the rainbow is real or not. Cue the acrophobic's nightmare.
A commercial in which an old man relates to his co-workers that anything he touches turns into Skittles. This is emphasized by the following line: "I met a man on the bus today. I shook his hand. He'll never see his family again." The commercial tries to play this off for laughs, but really, if this man touched you, you would instantaneously turn into Skittles.
Not to mention the way he says he'll never touch his own new baby boy. Yeesh.
A human pinata who complains of people running up to him in the street and mauling him, expecting candy inside.
The sheep-boy one is especially creepy. Even more so by the fact that the farmer knows they are sheep-men, and not regular sheep.
A man with an hourglass full of Skittles that represents how much longer he has to live. The guy's friend eats a handful of Skittles as the man pleads with him not to eat the Skittles because it's aging him. We get to see him age from slight baldness to white-haired wrinkly old age in seconds, while his friend pops yet another Skittle into his mouth.
My stomach falls through my feet every time this commercial is aired. Just reading about it made my eyes water.
A guy has a tree that produces Skittles growing out of a hole in his stomach. His mother, instead of hiring a specialist to get it removed, just lets him live in the field while she harvests the Skittles from his tree. And when he suggests that he wants to get it removed and go to college or something, his mother reminds him that they agreed to stop it with that "silly dreamer talk". It's implied that he's gonna be like this for the rest of his life.
The scariest part? These are all played for laughs.
(Shudders) The screaming bunny thing. Just the way we hear it off in the distance at the end...somewhere out in the darkness and rain, a rabbit is singing a One-Woman Wail...
It was played under the Skittles logo at the end of a lot of the commercials. Just a girl's voice whispering that.
There is an ad featuring a man eating—and feeding another person—Skittles with his prehensile beard. (the part where he lovingly strokes the woman's face with his beard-hand and says "Experience..." is chilling!)
The recent Dark Chocolate M&Ms commercial with the cast of The Addams Family (vaguely inhuman) combined with the company's animated mascots (cartoonishly exaggerated), sends the whole thing deep into the Uncanny Valley... It's just creepy as hell.
The whole "M&Ms that look like people" campaign is horrifying. Entertainment Weekly said it best. "Who wants to eat candy with hair?"
Dr. Phil M&M! AHHHHHHH!
To be fair, the M&Ms that look like people aren't all that bright. You shouldn't jump on a trampoline in boots, lady.
I seem to remember a series of M&Ms ads from back when I was in high school in which the talking M&Ms were trying to talk the humans into not eating them. In general, it was sort of like the "Where's the cake" example a little ways above on this page, but I remember one particular one where the M&M asks some guy to "put yourself in my shoes," followed by a daydream sequence in which a giant M&M pulls people out of a dish and eats them. After this, the guy starts taunting the talking M&M by eating a bunch of M&Ms from a candy dish in front of him while saying things like "Oh, there goes your sister! <eats an M&M from the dish> Oh, there's your first date! <eats another M&M from the dish>." At this point, the talking M&M at this point goes "... Cheryl?" with this expression on his face that made you feel sick to your stomach with sympathy for the little guy...
Sympathy? This one M&M's commercial where Red, Yellow, and Orange talking to a guy in a convenience store who was eating M&M's as they were. The guy and Red get into a semantics argument and when he points out cannibalism is unnatural, what do the boys do? They switch bags so they don't have the same type as themselves. It's still cannibalism.
A commercial for pretzel M&M's features the "Orange" mascot complaining that there is no way they're going to put a pretzel inside him. Cut to the pretzel, which is roughly the size of Orange and ALSO sentient. His line: "I'm not too happy about this either." So...they're going to take one sentient being...and surgically implant it...inside another sentient being. I'm not sure whose point of view is squickier. The full version of the commercial makes it even worse, with the pretzel telling Orange, "Let's just get this over with." Like he doesn't even care that he's gonna be stuffed inside the guy standing next to him.
A 2003 UK commercial for Wrigley's X-cite gum showed a wet dog crawling out of a man's mouth before he has the gum, causing the dog to disappear, with the slogan 'Avoid Dog Breath'. It attracted 860 complaints to Ofcom, and was eventually withdrawn - but you can still find it [1].
Spit out that Stride gum... or we'll find you. This gum company sets up Gambit Roulettes, able to arrange (and perfectly time) freak accidents like zoo animals bushwhacking you on the street.
This Kinder Surprise ad features what is presumably Humpty Dumpty; understandable, what with Kinder Surprises being egg-shaped. Unfortunately, Humpty is a disturbing flesh colour, has an articulated face that falls deep down into the Uncanny Valley and gurgles excitedly in a bizarre gibberish language, delivering the line "OHHHH GRUBBLY!" as if he's at the point of orgasm.
"CHOCODOOBY!!!!!"
Apparently, someone decided to make him in Saints' Row 2.
An approximately two-year-old Juicy Fruit commercial was shot in the style of a home video of a kid's birthday party. As the partygoers were about to break open the equine pinata, the pinata came to life and attacked them. Everyone's "gotta have sweet," after all.
That Dairy Milk ad with the two kids, a girl and a boy, doing unnatural things with their eyebrows to a dance track backing. It's freaky.
The boy is okay, but the girl has "a stare of death" about her.
M&M's again, with this unsettling parody of Alien. For best results, watch it in a dark room at night, at full screen, with headphones.
There was a Dairy Queen ad a few years back for the Brownie Blizzard. A man with a speech impediment recommends the Brownie Blizzard over licking brownie batter off of a food mixer, as "ith's thsafer". We see a flashback of the man at home licking the beater. From the exterior of his house, we hear the mixer turning on and the man and his wife screaming. What's so scary about this? This is the second version of the ad. The original, which only ran for about a week, went like this: We actually see the mixer turn on as the man licks the beaters, and it goes for what feels like five minutes with the man and his wife screaming, and we get a nice close-up of the man's mangled tongue slowly being fed through the beaters. Who in hell approved that one?
The HYPNOMOOSE. Especially the second one with the caressing antlers.`
Starbust's "Zombie Ad" in the "contradiction" series is not a nice one to wake up to in the middle of the night.
A Starburst commercial from 2005 showed a group of teenagers who were eating Starbursts, but then we see an inside shot of one of those teen's mouths, and we find out that they're actually eating miniature people, and we see the people being chewed up and swallowed. Sure, the mouth was a cardboard prop, but still, the thought of teenagers chewing up and swallowing miniature people, and acting all calm about it is unsettling, and has kept me from eating a Starburst candy ever again.
The new Snickers Peanut Butter Squared commercial in which a company is feeding unwitting people to a focus group of sharks, and then asking the sharks opinions. The commercial ends with them sending another poor soul eating the advertised candy to his brutal death.
What makes the shark commercial especially disturbing is that they refer to the victims by their first names (repeatedly), and we even see pre-shark-demise photographs of two of them. It's hard to enjoy black comedy when they insist on reminding you that these are people.
This old 1991 commercial for Dum Dum lollipops, I was creeped out by the whole commercial, mostly the end when the kid says "Ohh wow wowwwwwww, and eats the lollipop THAT WERE MADE OF CHILDRENS HEADS!!!!! Here is the commercial [2]
The Hershey commercials full of people made of chocolate being thrown around to the tune of "I Melt With You" are... really creepy.
A Mentos commercial features a couple sitting on a couch together, when the girlfriend starts freaking out over a spider crawling along the floor. Her boyfriend goes to pick it up and toss it out, but the spider grabs his finger and starts slinging him around like a ragdoll! All the while, his terrified girlfriend is on the couch screeching helplessly while a spider beats the tar out of her boyfriend. Not a great ad for arachniphobes...
The recent Heineken beer ads where an android woman doubles as a fridge. Not scary to anybody with even the most meager interest in sci-fi, but looks positively strange to the Norms. Also resulted in a laughably inept feminist web campaign against it.
There is also the point that it's depicted as Golden, frothy liquid from a person's abdomen... Ew.
The Budweiser "Wassup?" ad with the dog that turns out to be an alien in disguise.
In 2004, Nestea launched a series of commercials that featured a "cool" snowman. Only, in the course of the commercials, it would be revealed that deep down, he was a creepy skeleton and he'd drink tea to turn back into a snowman.
ThisAppleGeeks webcomic has a good explanation of how the Kool-Aid Man can be Nightmare Fuel.
Interestingly, scary commercials were parodied in an advertisement for Sprite. It showed a mom about to serve her two kids a Brand X citrus beverage, when the mascot (a hideously cutesy CG-animated sun) jumped out of the packaging and started to extol its flavor and vitamin content. All three screamed and ran, as it chased them trying to encourage them to drink up. Of course, when the mother tripped, and she urged her children to keep going and save themselves as the mascot nearly caught up to her, it might've crossed over the thin line between parody and actual Nightmare Fuel. Even the dog was scared.
A Coke commercial once featured football players slowly melting from the summer heat (needing to be restored by a cool drink, namely Coke.) Worse, at the end, one guy was almost dissolved and the Coke was just out of reach, and he was screaming for someone to help him get it. Only now, years later, do I realize that that was supposed to be funny. Yeah, if "funny" means "you run to the other side of the house every time it comes on and cover your ears to be sure you won't hear any of it," it was the most hilarious thing ever.
That "someone" being Boomer Esasion, who was only too happy to pass his state-of-matter-changing compadres a bottle of diuretic-infused goodness.
There was a Pepsi commercial back in the early '90s where a boy was on the beach sucking Pepsi out of a glass bottle through a straw. As he sucks to get the last little drops from the bottle, he somehow gets sucked into the bottle, and we see him grotesquely squashed up while his sister yells "MOM!".
She actually yells, "MOM! He did it again!" The implication being, of course, that A) he's done it before, on account of B) Pepsi is just so Goddamned important that anything, up to and including horrible, painful mutilation, is better than not getting every last molecule out of the bottle.
Not to mention, the fact that this act of self-bottling has become routine for the boy's family means that it only elicits an "Ew!" now... But how scary was it for everyone involved the first time it happened? And what did it take to finally get him back out of the bottle and back to normal, anyway? It just raises too many questions.
That commerical scared the crap out of me and pretty much scared my childhood!
The Judderman from a Schnappes/Metz campaign was officially judged one of the ten scariest things ever seen on TV, and with good reason. The Judderman was an evil puppet who tempted you with an alcoholic beverage so he could steal your soul, thus turning you into a puppet..
Orangina has an ad that's really freakish: anthropomorphic animals rendered sexily are cavorting in a forest, and at one point a squid woman squeezes two oranges against her breasts, and juice squirts forth from them toward the viewer.
The Ribena ads during the 90's that were quite similar to the Oragina ads only creepier because of the monsters in them.
Actually that commercial could go either way depending on your "Tastes"
There's a new Coke Zero commercial in which two tongues with stubby little feet think they are drinking Coke, while an eyeball with legs tells them that the bottle says Coke Zero.
The recent Capri Sun ad campaign "Respect The Pouch" delves kids into all sorts of Body Horror, with their untimely fate relating to what exact kind of "abuse" they did to juice pouch.
A kid's head turns into a bobblehead as a result of hitting the pouch with a bat.
A boy starts endlessly leaking water out of his sides attempting to put the straw at the wrong of the pouch.
A girl swells up with her body parts turning into whoopee cushions in an attempt to use the pouch as one to her friends.
A boy turns into a chicken putting the pouch in a coop.
A girl becomes an inanimate statue ride trying to pogo stick on the pouch.
A kid turns into a bike trying to run over the pouch with his.
A girl becomes several helium balloons twisted into her vague shape after trading her pouch with a friend for a balloon filled with sand or something.
A boy becomes a dog's chew toy after tossing the pouch to his dog.
A little girl buries a pouch at the beach, and is turned into a sand sculpture. Then her arm falls off!
If you visited the website...they actually made games of those too...
The original "Respect the Pouch" ad was the worst. One kid drinks his Capri Sun, blows air into the pouch, throws it to the ground, and then, just as he's about to step on it...he explodes.His friend just looks inconvenienced.
I think the variant where the kid who stomps the pouch merely has a tutu poofed onto him, while his innocent friend is turned into a grandfather clock, is worse
There was a recent commercial for a soft drink featuring three guys campng, drinking said soft drink. One guy takes a drink and his chest/stomach begins to glow. Suddenly, there's a buzzing sound, steadily geting louder and louder, and finally a giant, heavily detailed fly buzzes onscreen and flies right into the guy's chest, where it promptly explodes, sending goo over the man and his friends. Guh....
Sobe Life Water's campaign featuring creepy looking lizards with frighteningly large teeth. The ad seems to imply that it can either cause people to mutate into reptiles or that it's safe for pets (though 'safe' is a relative term).
A commercial campaign in Quebec for the 10th anniversary of Sloche (some slushie) are rather disturbing. The commercials all involves clowns getting mutilated in a Saw style. One involves shoving a clown in a woodcutter while another, more graphical, involves a butcher cutting a clown in pieces. How this is supposed to represent slushies is beyond comprehension.
That's without counting the posters◊ that are everywhere in the city.
This Coca-Cola Open Happiness advert ... apparently, Your Mileage May Vary, but I honestly think it's pretty terrifying.
Speaking of Coke, there's an internet add floating around which starts off with a portrait of the man who inventer Coca-Cola and a message flashing on the screen, one word at a time. Inbetween words, you see the guy's finger raise to his mouth in a gesture signifying silence. At the end, the portrait grows bright for a second as the camera zooms away, and suddenly, you see a coke bottle with a lock on it.
You mean this? It's actually some bizarre ARG. I was actually too frightened to even do anything, though.
Um...Alternate Reality Game? Really? A shortened version of that ad was playing all the time on TeenNick this summer and fall, I wasn't scared, but my subconsience must have been because I stopped bothering to watch The '90s Are All That by the end of October for no clear reason.
I remember seeing the Sierra Mist commercial with the some guys in kilts playing the bagpipes and the one guy doing a Marilyn Monroe rip off of standing above a vent and cold air blowing up and lifting his kilt with cold air covering his buttocks and genitals and the little kid going "That's not right". I found that creeping and funny at the same time.
This Evian commercial is cute and creepy at the same time. The part that is the most creepy is when the babies jumps at you and clings to the fence.
let us not forget the (in)famous commercials for K-fee coffee. I mean, one second, it's just a peaceful shot of a car driving down the road. Then, once the car goes offscreen.......AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!! A disturbing-looking zombie appears out of nowhere and screams at you.
That wasn't an actual commercial, it sounds like that one screamer that was posted all over The Internet.
Don't you mean this? [3] The rest of the ads are Here
There are also pardoies where they replace the Zombie/Gargoyle with a guy saying "Boo", a guy in a puppet bear suit doing a giggle that sounds sort of like boo or a guy in a mask saying "Bwa Ha Ha". There found with the link with the other ads.
Medication Ads
Other than the usual offscreen listings of horrid side effects from a soft-spoken man who just drank three kegs of Red Bull, there are plenty of visual examples of pharmaceutical terror such as....
The ever-smiling "Bob" from the commercials for Enzyte "natural male enhancement" pills could easily be mistaken for the Joker's bastard son with his near-rictus grin.
The announcer, with his smirking double entendres, makes it worse. The Christmas commercial in particular had the phrase "there seems to be a lot of rumors going around about this chubby Santa." These played until at least June of the next year.
And you know who the announcer is? David Kaye. And the voice he uses is one "Yeeesss..." away from being a plot to destroy Humanity.
And you know what's even scarier? How much Bob's "wife" looks just like him. Ever notice how "she" is never in the same scene as he is? I swear, it's like the actor put on a blonde wig and a dress just to save the advertising company some cash.
There was a series of cold medication commercials (for Afrin—they made allergy medicine, too) that had the sufferers' heads transform into huge noses. That in and of itself is creepy, but the fact that the nose-head was also used in a children's game show just added fuel to the fire.
In the early '90s, a Canadian cough syrup company started to market a new syrup brand called "Hack Attack". The syrup alone seemed to work just fine, but the ad campaign for the product took Nightmare Fuel to new heights. There were three (possibly four) commercials recorded, each showing a person sitting by themselves in a different location (a room with graffiti, an airplane and a candlelit room) where the person would sit facing the viewer. All of a sudden, their bodies start to freak out and contort, with their faces undergoing stop-motion transformations as the expressions change in less than a half-second. They manage to take the cough syrup, and instantly turn back to normal. It was only due to a letter campaign by concerned parents watching their kids freak out that the campaign ended.
Lamisil's infamous "Digger the Dermatophyte" commercial, which has a hideous little gremlin-like creature lifting up a person's toenail and diving in under it.
It would help just a little bit if he didn't sound so much like Christopher Walken.
That Benylin Mucus Cough advert with the green monkey clawing some man's chest would have terrified me if I were 5 years old.
Anyone a little creeped out by that commercial where the secret, impossible passageway opens up in this guy's bedroom and a doctor walks in and watches him sleep? I don't know, the whole message seems to be: your doctor can't always be there to monitor your health, so you should probably let him break into your house through a rift to another dimension and stalk you whilst being a mockery of the natural order. It also doesn't help that he takes the liberty of covering up his patient with the comforter like a doting parent, which is supposed to be reassuring, but....paranoia, what paranoia?
Treximet's inaugural TV commercial features women who "want to take their heads off" due to having migraines. They're actually holding their heads. Thankfully for most, the ad was revised, featuring the women ripping off their heads (not violently, but as if they were on paper).
The Nicorette ad with the guy's mouth escaping from his face and running away.
How did we get this far without mentioning the Lunestra ads — you know, the ones with the giant, floating Luna Moth that lands on your FACE and puts you to sleep?
Your Mileage May Vary. I always thought those commercials were rather peaceful. And Lunas are beautiful for moths.
A medical device rather then medication this time. An Oticon (no relation) ad for a hearing aid featured a man walking in the park with his granddaughter, who began to grow fuzzy and indistinct, like a connection breaking, before finally vanishing. The color desaturates as the park turns into a Dark World with no other living creatures, except for faint indistinct words carrying on the wind, as the narriator talks about the solitude of it.
An ad for Plavix heart medication features a security guard at a mall at night with a gurney following him around. He never notices it. The narration: "If you've already had a heart attack, another one could be lurking, and this one could be fatal." It's incredibly disturbing to think that death is following him wherever he goes, especially in a physical incarnation, and he doesn't know it. Even worse, when you think about it, death follows us ALL around, and we can't ever see how close it is...
A British advert for either mouthwash or breath-fresheners illustrated the idea of morning "dog-breath" by having an obviously hungover male staggering around looking ill. He retches, then vomits. As we watch, a soggy and bedraggled dog's foreleg pops out of his mouth, them another... as his mouth stretches and distends, we watch him vomit up the entire dog, which shakes itself and walks away. withdrawn from TV after being denounced as the most disgusting thing ever screened.
Toy and Video Game Ads
In the early '90s, there were these commercials for toys that look like grotesque monsters riding on skateboards or other such vehicles. That was only half of it. At one point, they would show people complaining about the toys, and then a legion of them would fly across the screen. When they passed, the complainers were either beaten up in a nasty and/or supernatural way, put in hideous costumes, mutated, or worse...
I believe you're thinking of Tech Deck Dudes.
Something like that. I remember what three of them looked like: there was a skeleton with a scimitar, a sociopathic baby using its bottle as a weapon, and one called Tyrannosaurus Axe.
They were called Savage Mondo Blitzers. I should know; I still have all of mine in a cigarbox.
There was a commercial for a toy product called Boglins which were these monsters with gross-features such as pop-out-eyes.
So did this one. Unfortunately, various of her classmates actually owned them. They had horrible clammy rubbery skin...
There's a Godzilla toy commercial that was released at the same time as the '90s movie. A kid is playing with the Godzilla figure. When the commercial touts something about the figure's ability to do a large hand-swipe, the kid's arm and hand, holding the figure, turn into a huge Godzilla claw. Then, the commercial touts, 'Wild whipping tail!', where the kid (shown leaning over the toy to the left, leaning over it in a city landscape) grows a wild whipping tail that visibly goes down his spine, with a ring of electricity forming the tail as it 'grows' in mid whip.In the end, when they're saying, 'The Power of Godzilla, Battle Action 8!', the kid quickly is computer-graphics-ed from his toy-playing position into Godzilla, and attacks the camera.
Imagine if you will, you're walking home with your friends, when all the sudden, a burly man in a martial arts uniform comes along and beats you into submission because you're not playing a Sega Saturn. This is the the fine mix of Accidental Nightmare Fuel and Crazy Awesome that is Japan's Sega Saturn spokesbadass, Segata Sanshiro.
An ad for the board game "The Grape Escape" depicted several living cartoon grapes meeting their squishy fate in the jam factory. Complete with a cheerful jingle set to the tune of "Funiculi, Funicula": "Make 'em, take 'em to the factory / smash 'em, mash 'em, now they're history!..."
Unfortunate Implications much? Seriously...sit on that for awhile...what if that were a munitions factory? Noooow we're going places. Could also be taken as a shot/shoutout to robber barons' treatment of workers in the early industrial age.
Certain ads for childrens' toys and teen products have taken to morphing pictures of real people into Bratz-style abominations, complete with gigantic eyes, funnel-shaped heads, grossly exaggerated features, and I-am-going-to-eat-your-soul pouty lips.
A recent cash-in for the new Terminator movie are masks and toy gloves that look like the T-600 in the film. The freakiest part is that children are wearing them. First, 7-8 year old children looking like the Terminator, creepy. Second, some guy in marketing thinks that the Terminator franchise is suitable for children, makes me lose faith in humanity.
There's a Jigsaw action figure. His face seemed a bit too peppy to be intended for his actual audience.
This doll from the 1970s will EAT YOUR SOUL! Her name is "Baby Laugh-A-Lot" but it should be "Baby Beelzebub."
The commercial for Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock deserves a special mention. In it, one of the two players is about to do a mosh, but then a fist shoots out of his mouth. The other hand comes out and stretches the player's mouth painfully wide. Slash emerges from the player, while his body sloughs off of him like a piece of discarded clothing. "Creepy" doesn't begin to describe it.
There is some good news about it, though. If the commercial happens to be showing the good reviews it got on the screen, then the creepy special effect doesn't matter.
There is a Kirby in Dreamland commercial where Kirby inhales a Rambo expy named "Dashing Superguy", who was played by a real actor. The entire commercial can be found here
The new Rock Band/Xbox ad featuring a young woman who starts off looking confused...then elated...then the camera pans around and the back of her head is hallowed-out, with a mini band playing where the rest of her head should be.
There's a particularly disturbing PSP ad in which people somehow turn into something resembling a tv and are played around with.
An ad in the early to mid-90's, I think it was for Sega Genesis, involved a guy willingly leaping into a meat grinder, being ground up into beef chuck, wrapped, and labeled for resale. To which the packaged meat man jiggled and said, "Cool."
One recent ad for Metal Gear Solid 4 features a man on a bike being chased by a giant, multi-story tall metal Praying Mantis with glowing red eyes. It seems perfectly willing to take out innocent, presumably occupied cars just to get at the guy on the bike. And, oh yeah, it's bulletproof. All while a dry British voice recites a messed-up nursery rhyme in the background.
This actually isn't an ad for the game, but an ad in the game.
Every PlayStation system has had at least one bizzare (therefore attention-capturing) ad.
Chris Cunningham's PlayStation ad (here) . Who is this mutant woman and why does she speak about "mental wealth"?
The PlayStation 3 "Baby" ad. The entire series of those three in general, but that one most of all. First, the baby's eyes click open as the camera moves towards it. It's a doll, but it coos and giggles with realistic mouth movements as it reaches towards the system. The laughs turn into horrible, horrible maniacal laughter in a deep voice. The baby gasps as if for air, where you see its eyes, which show scenes of violent PS3 gameplay whilst the baby cries. The tears are then absorbed back into the eyes, as the eyes turn bright orange. Cut to a wide two-shot, where the baby says "mama...mama" as the PlayStation levitates in mid-air. Watch it here
Oh... God... why the hell did I watch that? * runs screaming to her Mummy*
One the worst thing about those commercials is that they were never pulled for being insanely creepy. That means network execs everywhere saw this commercial and said "Meh, it's alright. Let's show it in the middle of the day to let it fester in the minds of children until bedtime, whereupon it will be remembered and horrific nightmares will ensue."
The Hero Questad from the early 1990s where one of the players turns into a monster at the end.
One print ad for a video game emphasized its super-fast-paced gameplay by encouraging players not to blink - a solution to which was rendered as a close-up of some kid's eyes with the lids surgically removed. The fact that the lids appeared to have been recently removed and the incisions looked fresh made it even worse.
Ugh... I remember that one, too... I'm gonna take a stab and guess it was Nanotek Warrior?
Haunting, though somewhat alleviated that you play the sadistic bastard causing this mayhem. Somewhat. (Why it's important you scare the kids to death along with their parents isn't really ever mentioned, but then, Polterguy IS a skate punk, and you just don't sell sk8rs faulty products.)
I can't be the only one who is seriously FREAKED OUT by the recent Xbox/Netflix commercials where the back half of people's heads are missing and movies are apparently being projected into their empty skulls? Every time I see one of those damn commercials, I want to pat the back of my head to make sure it's still there...
Nope. Which might explain why this is on here twice.
A TV ad for Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins for the Game Boy was horrendously creepy, featuring Wario apparently trying to hypnotize the audience: "Obey Wario! Destroy Mario!" Who would've figured that he'd go on to be the goofy, greedy CEO antihero we all know and love today?
After a while, instead of showing the regular commercials that only had dead people, they began airing commercials that only FIRST showed dead people, and then the Assassin from the game. He almost looks dead at first, but then he leaves the screen, and the camera cuts to cool gameplay footage. The scary church-bell like sounds in the background have now been remixed into a song, and at this point, the ad is so cool that it can now be considered Nightmare Retardant.
This commercial. Ever want to see four guys turned into live action versions of a TMNT knock-off toy line?
Sony had an incredibly disturbing french commercial for its "Artcade". HEAD (for artcade)
The ad for Jaguar's Alien vs. Predator game, where the player's mom taps him on the shoulder, then he turns and discovered that she's been killed by a xenomorph.
The ad for the board game Perfection, in which the playing pieces burst from your chest if you move too slow.
Plus the fact that the guy who fell to his death was the guy who didn't even want to cross that damn bridge in the first place...
There was an ad for an old NES game (anybody know which one?), which stars the villain of the game as he lounges in his den and explains to us how hard the game is. The nightmare starts when he reveals that he has a wall of kids' severed heads mounted like trophies. The villain explains that these are the kids who played the game and lost, naming which part of the game was each child's downfall. He then challenges us: "Wanna see how far YOU can get?". Strangely, I only recall seeing that ad once. Wonder why.
There was a commercial for a Goosebumps make-your-monster-head thing, and in the commercial these kids make this gross head with goop sliding out of the head. And then they go show to their dad, but then the dad says something like "What do you think of MY face!" and he turns around and he has a horrific Nightmare Face instead of a regular face.
The USA Sega Saturn commercials. Every fucking one of them. These adverts, while meant to bring down the Saturn's competitors, the N64 and the PSX, simply brought children into nightmares they could not bear. The campaign was like this: Sega of America wanted to destroy the competition. And boy did that fail! If images of creepy "pierced to the end" faces telling you to get the Saturn wasn't enough, try some Satanic voice telling you that "Pretendo 64" wasn't worth waiting for (apparently?). Que N64s being shot like Clay Pigeons up in the sky and being destroyed.
But that's not all. That's not even close to all of it. Those tapes you got in the mail advertising the Saturn? Creepy. As. Fuck. Not only did it contain the ads mentioned above, but more. Tons more. Bald Lady with "Saturn's" rings around her head? Yeah, it's funny till it makes a child weep in a corner whining about how he was expecting the system, not some fucked up people whispering shit to them. And then, around the time for the 6pm news, you are treated to "Theater of the Eye", an ad campaign showing the inside of a body who just played the Saturn. Did SOA know this thing would bomb? Because the ad sure shows it! Expect bladder problems, nervous breakdowns, and of course, eye strains when playing the Sega Saturn.
The worst part? According to an old newspaper article, one of the SOA executives said that the whole purpose of the Theater of the Eye ad campaign was to show the body's reaction to how advanced the Saturn is, making people want to buy one, thus increasing sales. Instead, it ended up scaring people away from buying one.
There's this ad for the Magic: The Gathering card game, now thanks to this when I play the game I'm going to worry about a monster coming out of nowhere.
In a new commercial of the new Rayman game, Rayman Origins, an adult man bitches on and on about some childish things about the game (a la "A pink monster? I'm so concerned for my safety!") The creepy part is that at the end, tentacles grow out of the couch he's sitting on, and drags him into the couch, presumably eating him while a kid just sits there and WATCHES HIM DIE. Then he goes back to playing the flipping video game! *shudder*
Car Ads
A creepy Toyota ad involving disturbing square-headed people that has nothing to do with cars whatsoever
A recent ad for the Scion XD takes the viewer into a dark, gritty, dystopian world inhabited by "sheeple", then makes things worse by letting loose monsters called the "little deviants" to tear them apart in a way that's probably meant to cross the line twice, or at least provide Comedic Sociopathy, but instead comes across as genuinely bone-chilling, complete with a bloodless severed head sliding into the street. The sheeple look to live on the slopes that border the Uncanny Valley, as well. See the even creepier webgame version here. Also, apparently we're supposed to cheer for the little deviants? Riiiiight.
How about the new car ads that seem to feature scientists kidnapping athletes so they can suspend them in garages and suck the athleticism out of them through thick tubes?
And the one advertising the quietness of Toyotas by locking someone in a luxury Toyota with a mama killer badger and her babies. Cannons fire outside, but the badger is undisturbed. Then a cell phone rings insidethe car, and we get a Gory Discretion Shot/info screen with the sounds of mayhem for background "music." And then claws slash the screen. Slightly unnerving, that.
In one for what I think was a Toyota commercial there was the earth's gravity being reversed with the car advertised sticking to the ground. Now what made this nightmare fuel was the fact it was on a New York like street with pedestrians falling into the sky, screaming on the way with absolutely no chance of survival, people inside offices bing tipped onto the ceiling with some bound to be dead, and this is going on while the man inside the car taking a normal drive, sunglasses on, smiling, and happy music playing in the background. Practically bound to give some young child nightmares for a couple weeks.
And those Toyota Prius commercials with the happy humming, and the sun/earth/trees/road made of happily swaying people in grass costumes.
One of those commercials has the added bonus of having Sephiroth's voice actor narrating the damn thing.
The Kia Soul "peer into a Soul" commercials are kind of freaky too. Especially since in the early ones nobody knew what the hell it meant since it was just someone's messed up looking face blinking eerily at the screen with the company's website at the bottom of the screen.
Anyone else creeped out by Dodge's "My Name Is Ram" ad (which is a slideshow with the Ram truck speaking in a Creepy Monotone)?
This 1996 commercial for the GM EV1 is considered nightmare fuel by many, and it is believed that GM made it intentionally scary to make the car a flop. The creepy music, the shadows, the creepy voice, the fact that the car is never fully shown...
This. Yeah, it's supposed to be funny, but it fails miserably. Instead, you get something that reminds you of Nineteen Eighty-Four and some kind of massive police state. It gives you the feeling that everyone the "Green Police" arrest are summarily executed...
This new Cars.com ad, in which a man's inner confidence grows out of his body in the form of a second head.
Cell Phone Ads
The new 2010 US Cellular commercials where we see a rooster slowly opening its mouth or a guy throwing a bucket of water at you all accompanied by creepy music. Then everything stops and you see the words "WAKE UP". The bucket of water ad can be found here.
The latest AT&T commercial, with butterflies. Butterflies themselves don't freak me out, but OH MY GOD that ad is creepy.
The "AT&T Doppelganger" commercials, but more specifically, the Slate Sanchez one. You know, the one with the reporter who didn't get the call telling him he's reporting on a demolition from the blast zone? AND THEN YOU WATCH HIM DIE?!
Unfortunately, that commercial seems like an old Mad Magazine AT&T ad parody. It was Ronald Reagan calling Mikhail Gorbachev saying he was doing some bomb tests, and trying to calm him. Gorbachev, because of poor phone service, thought Reagan said he was going to bomb him. And then Gorbachev bombs America.
The damn commercial about the Sprint Boost Mobile phones with the pigs?! Creepy as hell. That they don't care about cannibalism and compare it to a crappy phone rate?
Motorola has a campaign for a cell phone featuring a sort of Cyber Punk industrial design and always ending in a Robo Speak voice muttering, "drrrooooyyyd". It's as though Moto is saying, "Hey, this phone was made with spare parts of HAL and SHODAN."
What's worse is the actual Droid phone itself (called the Milestone with less creepy branding out of the US), powers up with their Faceless Eye logo and that robot voice at boot. Probably not a big deal to many buyers, but there's a few demographics out there that would probably prefer something more comforting.
The Droid X commercial, just an extreme closeup of someone's eye turning into some kind of mechanical lens via Uncanny Valley. Oh lawd.
Has anyone seen that commerical about a phone's 4G capabilities is used by a father to tell his son a bed time story from the other side of the country, sounds heart warming, but unfortunately the ad also features your favorite fairy tale characters in the most uncanny valley way... with freaky masks!
The Virgin Mobile Android commercials starring the femalestalker talking about how she uses her phone to aide in her stalking. One of them has her hiding in his closet watching him! Are they trying to tap into the lucrative erotomaniac market?
Actually while the Yandere character in the commercials is undeniably creepy it can be considered somewhat YMMV on this due to that well she is undeniably cute as well. To boot compared to most of the Unintentional nightmares mentioned already before this, I think most guys would rather have a fairly hot chick staring at them creepily from their closets then the Burger King, anthropomorphic food, grotesque Uncanny Valley based horrors, or a Penguin that sings Doobie doobie doo like a deranged serial killer any day of the week, year, or Eternity.
A recent cell phone commercial features a guy with a little phone you'd give to a toddler to play pretend with surrounded by singing puppets. Creepy singing puppets.
There's a recent radio ad about Comcast now offering Tivo, where this is emphasized by a man and a woman both reading the copy in perfect sync with each other. While this alone is mildly creepy, for the last few lines they make it sound as though the two voices have merged into one.
A comcast commercial where a woman talks about her family switching to DSL. The way things are said unnerves me to no end. "We were a happy internet obsessed family, then we switched to DSL and the happy went away (shots of scenes inspired by various horror movies) Then we brought Comcast back and it brought back the happy." My reaction to that commercial is to believe the family has a screw loose.
The current campaign for Comcast cable features people walking through a bizarre-looking animated town while "singing" (chanting, really) a multisyllabic jingle in a creepy, zombie-like monotone a la the Moldy Peaches songs in Juno. The effect is far more spooky than hip.
Whoever came up with the recent print ads for Discovery Channel's Shark Week (featuring a portrait photograph of an otherwise friendly, grinning, bespectacled human who'd actually be rather cute - were it not for his rows of f-ing shark's teeth) should be forced to have said ad framed and hanging right where it can stare out at them all night long.
That guy in the print ad being Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs who is hosting this year's one.
There's an advertisement in the History International channel that's about a new show call Death Masks where they take death masks and use computer generators to bring them back to life as they would have looked. Well, the way they do that is show a computer generated image of Lincoln's head with his eyes closed. It's all silent except for a repetitive heart-beat sound effect as the image slowly zooms upward towards Lincoln's eyes and almost immediatly, they open. It would be freaky enough on its own, but they include the title right after the image fades. The heart beat effect? Still going.
The ads for the new V series in Warner Channel Latin America consisted of interrupting regular ads for other shows and features Anna's face saying something among the lines of "We come in peace".
Those new advertisements for the Chowder marrathon for 10/26/08 are both creepy and funny. They clip the scariest parts of the entire show, in a way simular to Snow White's Scary Adventures, with a shade.
The CBS promo for TheBigBangTheory moving to Thursday has the top half of Jim Parsons' (Sheldon) head in the lower left corner. * shudders*
Back when GSN was still the Game Show Network, they ran an ad that featured two clips from The Price Is Right. The first shows Bob Barker remarking that both Showcase Showdown contestants have made the same bid, and that has never happened in the show's history. The second is from a previous episode showing that it actually did happen before. Nothing scary yet...until the screen fades to black with this message: "Be careful what you say...Game Show Network is watching."
Clothing and Shoe Ads
A Levi's advertisement in late 2001 featuring singing bellybuttons to the tune "I'm coming out".
Not to mention it helped jump-start the horrible, ultra low-rise jean fad. The sight of a plus-sized gal in denial, muffin-topping out of her jeans is Accidental Nightmare Fuel in itself....
Except that those jeans gave everyone who wore them ridiculous muffin top, not just big girls.
On this theme, the Reebok Belly ad: A man is chased by a huge disembodied beer belly that repeatedly screams "Belly's Gonna Get Ya!" Looking back, it must have scared the crap out of a lot of kids.
Or ADULTS...shudder...
My older brother would run screaming from the room every time a Bugle Boy Jeans ad played in which a kid tries on a pair of jeans at a department store and is immediately abducted by one-eyed aliens.
Can't believe this one hasn't gotten a mention: guy buys a pair of Levi's jeans off a mannequin in a store. Mannequin proceeds to follow him home, lurks creepily outside his house... and the last shot is the mannequin's shadow sloooooowly moving over the guy's sleeping form. And the whole thing is set over the guttural, possessed wail of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put A Spell On You."
The Old Navy Mannequins. Those creepy smiles of theirs. It makes me feel like they will steal your soul and enjoy doing it too.
It gets worse when you go into a store and see giant propaganda posters of them hanging above store mannequins that have no head!
There's an ad on the [[Buster Brown page on The Other Wiki that is truly scary beyond all reason and sanity.
This one was from the late '90s, but I used to be freaked out by an ad for Nike (I think it was) with two basketball players on a court in the sky and a shot showing the ball falling down the ground very far below.
One shoe brand advertised by showing a huge, muscular cartoon squishing and maiming rather innocent looking pink cartoon people. One had him interrupting a ball game and killing all the players.
The shoe-sale site turned Internet department store Zappos.com unveiled an ad campaign featuring a (possibly) creepy, lifeless-seeming red haired puppet representing a Zappos employee.
Levi's "Go Forth" campaign, which features a 19th century recording of a Walt Whitman poem. Somehow, the disconnected imagery and almost Uncanny Valley sound to the recording make the commercial far more unsettling than it should be.
A Diesel jeans commercial showcasing safe for work porn. I don't know if this is supposed to be titillating or funny, but the first time I saw it, I was freaked out.
Ads for Websites
There's a really scary internet ad floating around that looks like a promo for The Ring, where this wide-eyed face [4] stares at you and there is bright blood-red font saying 'Ask the Ghost a Question!' with a text-input box.
Careerbuilder.com ad. It involves an anthropomorphic firefly singing with a human about wishing upon a star for a better job. The stars fall from the sky when what looks like a black widow is shown eating the anthrofirefly alive. It then zooms in on the red eyes of the inconspicuous CGI spider as it stares at the human, the firefly still inside.
Even worse when you realize the firefly is still being wrapped up with webbing. The guy probably could save him if he wanted to, but doesn't seem to realize this...
That friggin' Super Bowl Careerbuilder.com ad featuring the still-beating heart bursting out of a woman's chest, then walking around with squishy footsteps as she sits there like a zombie. W. T. F.
Ads popping up for a site called ''Jessicas-Diet.com" that feature typical before and after photos like most weight loss programs...except that they hide the model's identity with an unspeakably creepy black smudge over their face, making them look more like something out of a horror movie.◊
IMVU advertisements. Uncanny Valley and Erection Rejection to the max! They're everywhere on the Net, and they're out to get me....
The creepy Hulu.com alien commercials with the Alec Baldwin one probably the worst, given Alec's reputation for being a villain and for playing those kind of roles in movies, the ad just makes him sound even more evil. Although the Eliza Dushu one might be Fetish Fuel to some because of the tongue.
The Netflix Stepford Smilers. Their lives revolve around Netflix, they have only one mode (talking perkily, with the exception of the senile old man), and their incompatibility with normal humanity puts them so deep in the Uncanny Valley that nobody would notice if the PS3 baby was sitting on the middle of the dinner or coffee table.
Grandpa's not senile, he's just the Only Sane Man who realizes what a Stepford Smiler Hell he's living in. Only instead of being terrified, he's pissed off. That's why he and Mr. Puddy only watch scary movies, its the only release he gets from them besides the eventual welcoming embrace of death.
The "have your favorite celebrity's baby" (or whatever) internet ads for some image-combiner. A deformed version of Rowan Atkinson's bug-eyed "goofy" face (complete with heavy five-o'-clock shadow) on the body of a baby. Horrifying.
You know those "Avatar Yourself" ads for some kind of image-creator, where apparently you take a picture of yourself and it shows you what you'd look like as a Na'vi? Yeah, well, one of those had a picture of The Joker. ThatJoker.
Speaking of those, there are "Real or Fake" website ads that shows different nightmare fuel things, like an extremely fat man with an apparent Balloon Belly, and a man-dog hybrid, but by far the worst is one on deviantART, of a hamster-gerbil-man hybrid thing. Click at your own risk: [5]◊
A 'Zombify Yourself' ad, showing a guy with completely red, bleeding eyes and an animated mouth.
Creepy Mascots
The King, the masked and costumed mascot from a recent ad campaign by Burger King, is considered creepy by many, with his permanent grin, dead eyes, and unnerving ability to appear almost anywhere (at a football game, the top of a construction site, in your bed, etc.), to offer you a sandwich. Memetic Mutation website YTMND.com managed to turn the King into a stalker figure.
Burger King themselves one-upped this with an Xbox 360 game called Sneak King, in which you stalk unsuspecting people and surprise them with food — complete with a horror-movie soundtracked intro of the King lurking in a suburban backyard, moving from shadow to shadow.
The animated version seen in commercials for The Simpsons Movie is even creepier, especially as he's not drawn in the same style as the Simpsons characters.
An advert for the Simpsons movie viral website Simpsonizeme.com features Kang and Kodos working at Burger King, and then turning people into Simpsons characters by blasting them with a ray gun.
Recent Burger King commercials exploit this, sending a team of "Hit Moms" after the King.
The newly released one with the Logan's Run-esque setting and the "good with his hands" line just gives ya the shivers.
And now the most recent one has him as an illegitimate father, with a son that looks like him. Creepy doesn't even begin to describe it.
That commercial looked like a certain scene in Return of the Joker. * shudder*
New Zealand is only now getting the King, after happily living with his food and only his card crowns to show. Now we're being stalked by ads of him running through our airport security, and bilboards containing only the phrase "The King is coming" and him looking out through a slit. Plain creepy.
It's even worse now that he's been given an Iron Man suit. Not only will the King be stalking you, he now has jet boots if you try to run. Think about that and try to sleep tonight.
They now have pillows that you can buy. One side has the BK Breakfast Menu, and the other side has the King's face on it. Now you can REALLY "wake up with the King".
Ronald McDonald looks like a brightly coloured composite of Cesare and Gwynplaine.
Mr. Six, the dancing senior from ads for Six Flags (played by Danny Teeson under heavy makeup and prosthetics), looks like a soulless homunculus who clawed his way out of a retirement home from Hell just to dance around unnervingly and load people aboard buses to a second-rate amusement park.
Seiko's mascot for their public clock tower design services in Japan. See it here. Granted that the ad targets Japanese bigwigs who own their own buildings, but god knows how many of them shat bricks or contracted Seiko to built a clock out of sheer fear after seeing this.
Mr. Clean qualifies as Nightmare Fuel, being a big, menacing looking man with a shaved head and a hoop in his ear.
Also, the commercials seem to imply that a full-sized cartoon version of him can enter your home when you use his product.
A character in Flash Forward (a savant) even references Mr Clean, and warns about someone who "looks like Mr Clean".
In the 1970s 3M used The Invisible Man as a mascot for Scotch Magic Transparent Tape, and the ads always seemed to run during holiday specials...just in time to frighten the living crap out of young viewers.
LUVS Diapers once used this mascot for a few commercials, a talking diaper called Little Luvs. The fact that the diaper talks to the toddlers in the commercial has creeped out some people.
Chuck E. Cheese in The Eighties could have easily scared children back then. Just watch This. There's a good reason his design was changed sometime in The Nineties.
The animatronic version of Chuck E. back then somehow looked even Creepier.
From Denmark, meet Kaj and Boje, two seagulls advertising Scanlines ferries. With those humanoid eyes and floppy, Uncanny Valley movements (and current Genre Savviness about creepy mascots), they may have been intended to go past Ugly Cute into this trope.
Pretty much every kids' cereal mascot, including those created decades ago, are now designed with wild staring eyes and ratcheted up grins that suggest a massive sugar high.
Other Commercials
In a Smoking Ad, there's a little kid that get's left behind buy his mum and the kid cires his little eyes out as the voice over says 'If this is what your child feels after losing you for a second, imagine how they would act by losing you for a life' (I bet they actually got this kid's mum to walk away to get him to cry like that, he's probably scarred for life) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfAxUpeVhCg
In the Northeastern US there's a furniture chain known as Bob's Discount Furniture. Now most people just think of Bob's commercials as annoying with his loud grating voice and lame "come on down, catchphrase". On particular commercial however scared the crap out of a child of a family friend. In this ad Bob transforms into a ball and bounces around the room. The child in question was so upset by this imagery for some time afterward she would run screaming out of the room any time a Bob's Discount Furniture commercial came on.
A long-running ad campaign for a certain brand of toilet tissue, here in the UK, involves a blond-haired toddler dressed up in a business suit running the company. I've never met anyone who didn't find this kid desperately creepy.
This article not only showcases ten extremely creepy examples, but also suggests that CRACKED writers have probably been doing some research on this wiki.
While a few of these are as wildly inaccurate as they are awesome (i.e. King Kong choke-slamming a shark!), many of the other posters on this list are bizarrely creepy.
One of the BBC Jam adverts had a woman making a plant grow, which spat out a small hedgehog-flower-type creature, which screamed right at her and they both screamed at each other until an awkward silence ensued. How on earth this could be connected to the BBC's famous concert programme is beyond just about anyone.
The ad for Brawny paper towels in which the image on the label starts serenading a woman shopping.
Worse so if you know that something similar (albeit bloodier) happened in a horror movie.
2008 Superbowl ads: Don't forget the one with Richard Simmons. (Shudders)
The commercial for Farmer's Help Point. A man sees that his car just got stolen. Then he imagines the spot where he's standing sinking into the ground, and when he gets out and looks back at it, he sees a man with a sinisterly smiling pink rabbit's head wearing a tuxedo, followed by the wall behind him sprouting many large eyes which stare at him, and to top it all off, a cat taunts him. "It's a strange feeling when your car gets stolen", huh? If you were having those kind of hallucinations in Real Life, a stolen car should be the least of your worries.
Another Farmer's Help Point ad features a creepy underwater circus.
You just HAD to get me curious, didn't you... OK..., For your viewing (dis)pleasure(?):
It seems that Farmer's Help Point SPECIALIZES in this trope. Sorry(?), I couldn't find the underwater circus. Acronym Definition: GIYF, abbrev. 'Google Is Your Friend'... sometimes GOOGLE is definitely NOT your friend. Someone please pass me the Brain Bleach. Does it come with an Eye Scrubber?
There's this Japanese computer commercial in which a guy's on a date with his best girl- there's a full moon on the computer screen and the guy starts to feel uneasy and starts to turn into a werewolf from the back- but at the end of the commercial we see it's actually a wererabbit he turns into.
There's a new commercial for girl's deodorant that shows a group of girls riding through a cheesy haunted house with the "scary" things being cheesy effects like a teacher calling on them and an unhip father picking them up from a dance. The third "monster" is a horrible ghoulish white policeman mannequin with a really badly projected hologram for a face. There's something really creepy about that cop.
There was a commercial for some plant food back in the 80's that had a family enjoying a day out in the yard only to be slowly eaten by their starving lawn. The mother comes out to find her family gone and the lawn burps. I was afraid to go outside for weeks.
YMMV on whether its nightmare fuel or funny in a sick way (or both) but this ad certainly counts, with its lecherous talking bubbles who greet a woman trying to shower in the morning and harass her. "We're chemical residue leftover from your cleaner, made from toxic ingredients. We give you the impression of clean and we get to WATCH you clean!" [6] And as if getting sexually harassed by remnants of bathroom cleaners isn't enough, when the woman reaches for a loofah at the bubble's insistence, one of the bubbles appears to commit suicide by jumping off the faucet.
The commercial for the ED album for Tomica Hero Rescue Force features a creepy-looking redheaded kid in nothing but boxers on a field with a giant Earth. It's surreal, and the kid's expression throughout the thing doesn't help. This being Japanese TV, it's played during every airing of the show it's selling for. It doesn't get any less weird over time.
G4's Deer, Guinea Pig, and Butterfly ads for Midnight Spank are both hilarious and terrifying.
No mention of the Alton Towers adverts from the '90s? This one features live swans morphing into swan boats, self building train tracks, giant anthropomorphic animals, and some disturbing CG of rampant ghosts and a flying pink elephant. And it's all set to In The Hall Of The Mountain King as well
Aradio ad that used to air during the summer for several years which had a creepy demonic voice suggesting that you pull on a snowsuit, stroll through the insulation of your house, and when you were done go downstairs and turn on the furnace. She can't even remember what it was for and she still gets the shudders thinking about it.
This◊ advertisement for Swaim's Panacea, a 19th-century medicine that was supposed to cure anything, although it was made primarily of sarsaparilla and mercury. The most terrifying thing about it? That's the "after" picture.
Want some additional fuel for that nightmare? Take a close look at that picture, particularly the upper left leg of the chair the lady is sitting on. Yeah.
A recent ad for Axe has a man turned into chocolate, with horrifying white candy eyes and a frozen grin, and woman chasing after him. During the course of the ad he rips his nose off and sprinkles it on ice cream, melts his hand in a coffee pot, gets a chomp taken out of his ass on the bus, and it ends with his arm being torn off by a passing woman in a car. Enjoy.
The online campaign for the Universal Orlando Halloween Horror Nights programming is supposed - logically - to be scary, but the creepiest part is easily the voiceover given on certain pages in Mary's journal. Beginning with fairly benign, albeit creepy, audio recordings of her sessions with patients, and ending with a whole lot of murder - all delivered in a steady Creepy Monotone that only occasionally changes- to near-moans of pleasure from the doctor herself. And then she confronts you, the viewer, for eavesdropping... Ugh. It's not the actual content, but rather, the fact that you're not expecting these audio clips when you get them- usually only after clicking around. Gave me the jibblies.
One of the old adverts for the Las Vegas production of Starlight Express could easily be counted as nightmare fuel. The intro to the song "AC/DC" (which sounds quite spooky in itself) played over dark footage of an old man sitting in a dilapidated house, watching over an old deserted railway track. An impossibly fast, very noisy train approaches, with fighter planes and radars (I think) tracking it. It then ''runs over the old man''. And all this for a family-friendly show...
In the early 90's, this advert for National Power featuring walking pylons rampaging across the countryside scared the shit out of countless kids. Especially those who could see pylons close by from their bedroom windows...
... Aaaaand that's the return of another memory I had repressed for so long...
Sounds like someone watched a bit too much Pink Floyd's The Wall.
In France, a series of advertisements in the metro for various drinks and snack foods featured anthropomorphized animals - the animals had the bodies of shapely women and were dressed in sexy lingerie but had the heads, tails, and feet of the animal they represented and were entirely covered in fur. They were probably meant to be sexysomehow, but instead they were extremely disturbing.
Old ads for regional psychiatric institute would pop up with varying degrees of creepiness. ([7]).
The "Sweetest Love" bunny is very cute, yes. But when it appears on your TV singing loudly at 4 AM when all the lights are off, it's goddamn terrifying.
The K-Fee ads. You know those ones that show a seemingly normal scene, then a random screaming zombie pops up right in front of the screen? Yeah, you can scream like a little girl now
The worst part is that people make freaking screamers out of these ads on the Internet, saying that they were "banned" from TV and there was an eerie (ghost) fog in a scene. "You were never so awake," indeed...
Only saw 'em for the first time today, but the dogs with human teeth in the first half of this DentaStix commercial... * shudders*
Basically a case of Lampshade Hanging on the Uncanny Valley, which is apparent when even the dog sees there's something horribly wrong with the dentures proposal.
... Or in a lit room... Or in ANY Room...* shudder*
Am I the only one who finds the "Hello hello hello" voice at the end of Metro PCS commercials to be creepy? To the point where when an ad comes on, I have to mute it near the end?
Yikes, no, that's definitely unsettling the first time. But if you watch it enough, you'll eventually get completely desensitized, rendering it simply annoying.
800-588-2300, EMPIIIIIRE!
TODAY
You mean the one with the little man in the house? It is indeed fucking scary (and the other people in that house look exactly like him...)
Commercials for the Bissell ProLife vacuum cleaner have human beings as the vacuum cleaner. The gimmick is "find a vacuum made for YOU," but the image of a man with a vacuum-cleaner handle being dragged backwards up the stairs is just this side of the Uncanny Valley.
Cinnamon Toast Crunch-the cereal so tasty it can't resist eating itself! (And you should see the 2010 commercial...)
Gatsby always had those weird, funny commercials for their stuff, but this one really, REALLY creeps me out for some reason.
This ad for... I don't even know what, I couldn't get past the hair. * shudder*
There's an ad for Michelin tires running now. It's stormy and rainy and a rabbit almost gets run over. Then Bibendum shows up, the advertised tires are put on and it is sunny and happy and THE OTHER DEAD ANIMALS COME BACK TO LIFE. They appear to be reinflated like balloons, and they still have the tire tracks. Especially creepy if you had been scared/creeped out by Hocus Pocus and the truck scene...or Pet Semetary.
That's not the worst part. Before the guy comes and puts on the new tires, you see run over animals. But they're not dead. No, they're alive, their middles are just flattened on the road and they apparently get run over repeatedly.
There was a commercial from the 90's - can't even remember what they were selling - which involved the X-Men. One kid is boasting to his friend about how much his mom knows about the X-Men. When the other kid asks how she knows so much, Mom's eyes start glowing yellow, and she transforms into Mystique and quips "Takes one to know one." I'm sure some people were turned on by that, but the rest of us kids were terrified.
A new Old Spice commercial featuring Ray Lewis of the Baltimore Ravens has him giving the rest of his team a pep talk before running out onto the field. He asks "what is a heart?" and reaches into a hole in his chest, pulling out Old Spice. He then asks "what's in a heart?" and pulls a glowing swirling orb from the bottle. "An entire universe where doubt and sadness are replaced by Old Spice!" He then eats the glowing orb, sprouts six more heads from his shoulders, and all seven begin charging lasers from their mouths.
A recent commercial for a law firm featured a scene of a man with his dog and a woman with her bird, both sitting in a vet's office. The camera then pans over to the dog devouring the bird, its feathers hanging out of the dog's mouth, while the horrified woman looks on and screams.
The Target Black Friday Ads on TV. A crazed-looking, psychotic woman in a red tracksuit who looks like she might knife you in the back if you take the last door-buster deal. She might be in a Target, running with a parachute strapped on her back. She might be exercising in the store while creeped-out shoppers walk by her, eyeing them with distrust and paranoia. She might be telling shopping-versions of Christmas stories and songs to inanimate objects. "$5.99! $4.25..." Even worse, she might coming to your Target store...
A moody Swedish commercial for Apoliva cosmetics has spawned a Facebook page called "I'm Scared of the Girl in the Apoliva Commercial" with the words "It's only a matter of time before it creeps into our dreams and terrorises us in our sleep." The producers insist they were not trying to frighten anyone and the ad was just supposed to depict changing weather. Watch it... if you dare!
This terrifying promotional video for the June issue of Glamour magazine. Watch as Olivia Wilde's photoshopped visage suddenly starts to move and speak to you *shiver*
This Progressive insurance ad — "Did I mention, no hands in the bundler?" Most messed up thing is that the guy still works there. You'd think most people such a horrible thing happened to would be compensated by, I dunno, some kind of insurance....
This commercial by Method features a commercial for Brand X shower cleaner, in which a women (not horribly looking by the way) is getting help cleaning her shower/bathtub form some Scrubbing Bubbles knock off. When you think the commercial is over She goes to take a shower and guess whose there? The soap scum bubbles. They never left and are know watching her clean her self.as always, the link
THIS ... commercial ... just look ... at his, wait no, its face. The fact it gets a boner and peeps in a girl's classroom makes it even scarier. Just go watch for yourself, you'll see.
There's Allstate Car Insurance commercials, where the moment people start talking about Allstate, their voices are abruptly replaced by that of the deep-voiced spokesman, as if he's The Virus and spread by owning Allstate Car Insurance.
Public Service Announcements
There was a short-lived Australian ad about how smoking can cause Lungs cancer called Everybody Knows complete with mouth gangrene, tar squeezing out of a brain, surgeons slicing into a human lung and a rotten black decomposed foot. I ran out of the room screaming, but thankfully the Network censors took t off. The tune was sung in a depressing dirge of "Everybody knows, that how it goes, everybody knows, everybody knows" (shows pic of gangrened face)
A Smokey the Bear PSA from the 1970s and '80s features a beautiful normal-looking (if some what creepy) woman talking about fire safety in the forest. She then pulls off her head and reveals she is a ridiculously scary Smokey the Bear puppet!
The '80s remake of said PSA is tamer though. The unmasking part is more natural and less gruesome and the Smokey puppet looks more kid friendly and has a voice that sounds similar to that of John Goodman.
There's now an even tamer one that's still slightly nightmare fuel for some kids familiar with the old Smokey, I reckon. Has Smokey speaking in a woman's voice about fire safety, and then she turns into her normal self offscreen and the boyfriend asks where the heck she learned that from.
There's a series of fire safety ads featuring a computer animated fireball character who burns whatever he touches and speaks in a very tough sounding voice.
Perhaps more in line with Accidental Nightmare Fuel than the usual PSA fare, smallstep.gov is currently running ads about "losing that double chin"... featuring a double chin with an air valve on it. Yeeargh!
In an animated commercial supporting recycling, a kid was carrying a huge stack of newspapers to the curb, where a blue recycling bin sat. After looking around to check that nobody was watching, the kid opts to set the newspapers on the curb instead of in the bin, and turns to walk back up the driveway to his house. He is promptly snatched up by the tree in front of his house, which was growling and snarling, and it switches to a black screen with a statement something along the lines of, "Trees don't like it when you don't recycle." The commercial ends with a shoe dropping onto the driveway.
The PSA advising children to "Stop, Look, Listen." A young boy stands in a gloomy field with clouds overhead while the narrator tells his story in a far-too calm fashion. And they aim this at CHILDREN.
How in the world have we gotten this far without mentioning Mr. Yuk? Watch at your own risk.
There's a series of commercials in Mexico, similar in purpose to the American "Got milk?" ads. In these ads, you see a kid doing some sort of physical activity any kid would do, like going down a slide or kicking a soccer ball. Then, as soon as they do it, they suddenly shatter to pieces like a stoneware vase. Then you hear a voice saying "Kids who don't drink milk have weaker bones".
There was a commercial like that in the United States, too! Open: two children are entreated by their mother to drink up their milk. The boy points out that their next-door neighbor, working in his backyard, never drank milk and he's just fine. The said neighbor waves at the family through the window, then bends down to pick up the handles of his wheelbarrow. His arms promptly snap off. No blood or anything, just black holes in the sockets. Cut to the family through the window, whose screams cannot be heard as they are only seen through glass. Cut to kids chugging down the milk with terror in their eyes, and the mom taking it straight from the carton.
How about this one? It starts with a friendly old lady going to feed her many cats, all while happy, bouncy music plays... for about six seconds. It then abruptly switches to suspenseful horror music as the cat lady realizes she's out of milk and tries to substitute it with non-dairy creamer. The cats don't take it lightly and proceed to shut the window blinds, lock the door, and cut the power.
Then there's this Got Milk commercial, in which a man at a rather creepy carnival sets down his milk in the hall of mirrors and then has no idea of what's real and what's just a reflection. Existential Dread, indeed.
So we're going to declare war on cows and declare vegetarians to be filthy commies?
That's not exactly scary in itself. What is scary is the people's reaction, running like hell through the supermarket like there was an actual terrorist attack. Was I the only one reminded of "No Russian"?
Mike Gravel's online campaign spots, which involve him staring blankly at the camera for two minutes, then wandering off and throwing a stone into a nearby lake. As Jon Stewart put it, "the message is not 'vote for Gravel' as much as 'seven days after watching this video, you are going to die.'"
While not so much disturbing as distressing, a Woman's Refuge ad in New Zealand opens n a Playschool-esque happy setting, with an absurdly happy housewife and her absurdly happy career husband. Then the wife drops a cup on the floor, but continues talking to the camera. The husband tells her to pick it up. She shrugs it off, saying, "It's just a cup". He tells her, more tersely, to pick it up. She starts to notice that he's getting angry, but persists in saying, "It's just a cup". He backhands her and yells at her, "PICK...IT...UP!", sending her flying to the ground, and it looks as if he's going to go all Jack the Muss on her as the camera fades out. The actual events are not so much distressing as the fact that, if the husband gets so riled up at something so small, what actually happens to the wife when the really bad things go down.
British commercial tried to persuade people to visit the residents of retirement homes. It was long and featured a naked woman sitting on a bed in a dark room with one window. A voice-over read a poem that had been written by an elderly woman (it was found after her death) asking the reader to look past her age to see the human being she actually was. The setting and tone were creepy enough, but the final shot was a slow-moving close up of the face of the woman on the bed as she subtly yet rapidly aged. Then the screen quickly cut to a logo and a new voice giving the pitch, but even a class of grown college student were too busy being creeped out to care. God knows what any viewing five year old would think on their next visit to grandma.
Sounds like they did a fantastic job portraying retirement homes as cheery places to visit.
While probably not nightmare fuel, the smoker's hotline ad featuring people trapped in giant cigarettes is kinda disturbing.
This is some nightmare fuel for most Finnish kids who lived in the 80's and 90's. It's supposed to tell that taking shortcuts over frozen lakes (Finland has a lot of lakes even in the urban areas) in the winter is a bad idea because the ice is too thin to support you. Instead it managed to traumatize quite a lot of people. Might be for others too, as the video only has one spoken sentence in it in the end said by the bear character 'Varokaa heikkoa jäätä' (Translation 'Beware of the thin ice').
It is still shown today, although seldom in full length anymore. Some say that the older, longer version has a scarier soundtrack.
Recently, there has been a anti-drinking commerical running on American television. It shows a party where a bunch of teenagers are being controlled by puppet string and is making dramatic jerks and twitches while they do activities such as dancing and making out. Meanwhile, three sober teens are just standing there watching this whole thing.
The drunk driving PSA with crash victim Jacqui Saburido, who at the beginning is holding up a picture of herself before her accident (in which her face and 60 percent of her body were severely burned), then lowers it to reveal her permanently disfigured face. She has since been the subject of several surgery themed documentaries as they work to repair the damage that was done.
The Government of British Columbia broadcast a PSA in the early 1990s about the dangers of drinking during pregnancy. The PSA started with a fetus circling around and around on the screen with a voiceover saying "Mommy, don't drink, don't kill me". It was supposed to be broadcast between 9 PM and 5 AM, but it was once accidentally put on the air during the morning show. Cue hundreds of little kids hiding under beds, peeing themselves, terrified that the "monster" was going to get them, and hundreds of parents calling BCTV to complain. Cue hundreds more adults calling to complain because they didn't understand the meaning of the PSA and were upset to see what they thought was crude anti-abortion propaganda being broadcast at 7 AM. It was never shown again.
Also from Canadian television comes Astar, the robot from Planet Danger, who warned kids that "I can put my arm back on. You can't. So play safe." It obviously has very high production value, but the result is that everything in this commercial is haunting, from the ghostly sound effects to the freaky metal gears to Astar's voice.
This 1980s PSA from the Rock Against Drugs campaign starts off with a monstrous Gene Simmons rattling off the supposed virtues of drugs. Yes, Gene eventually goes into his "normal" look to warn us about not doing drugs, but still, pretty damned creepy beginning.
Parodies/References
Family Guy - on one occasion Peter crashes his car into the Kool-Aid guy's living room; the KAG admits it's not so fun when it happens to him. Oh Yeah!
A digression features Wilford Brimley advertising the bad things that diabeetus has caused him to do, delivered in an unnervingly passive-cannibalistic tone.
"Hi, I'm Wilford Brimley and I have diabeetus. It hurts me to pee and it causes me to be short with my family. I can't sleep at night. The other day I stubbed my toe and took it out on the dog; and just last week, I ran out of vanilla ice cream and struck my wife; and then I find out my wife's been dead for six years. Who the hell did I hit?!
Although not exactly nightmare fuel, the gum advertisment seen in the beginning of one episode is disturbing ...
Are you talking about the mock Mentos ad based on Abe Lincoln's assassination?
A Running Gag in Rugrats is that Chuckie's scared of the guy on the oatmeal box (the Quaker Oats Quaker).
The Quaker Oats guy is fine, but it's a bit creepy going through the cereal aisle at the supermarket and being surrounded by those kid's cereal mascots - every last one has the whites of their wild eyes showing around their pinprick pupils, their huge toothy grins look like the top of their heads are gonna fall off...is there something more potent than sugar in the stuff?
The Caprisun's Respect The Pouch campaign. It don't even really advertised the product, it look more like a Scare Them Straight PSA adjoining the kids to don't play with food. Here a sample of this campaign: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuG21cqmyHw
Actually, much of the ads who portray the clients like bastards (Lucky Charm, Trix,etc)are Nightmare Fuel of sort because of the diminishment of the very person who consume the product the ad try to sell.
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