Advertising - Television Tropes & Idioms

American Express: Once you see it, you'll shit rewards points.

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 Students Orgasm that strayed too far from selling a product.

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This article not only showcases ten extremely creepy examples, but also suggests that CRACKED writers have probably been doing some research on this wiki.
A PETA ad featuring terrorist turkeys.
A creepy Toyota ad involving disturbing square-headed people that has nothing to do with cars whatsoever
An ad for Zendough, a financial service, features numerous faceless scoundrels magically duplicating people's faces as a metaphor for identity theft. The protagonist's expression upon witnessing the initial theft pretty much sums up This Troper's reaction...
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...
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.
- This◊ poster.
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*
- The HP Lovecraft webcomic Unspeakable Vault Of Doom gave what is possibly the most convincing explanation of the Burger King ever.◊
- The Burger King has been given a voice, and he is Sir Mix-A-Lot.
- The Burger Kingon. Head ridge, violent rage, and a teleporter added to everything that made The King The King.
- The king is smilin' Bob.
- BEHOLD THE TRANSFORMER KING◊
There was an advert for Maxibon icecream bars that featured a guy turning into a polar bear.
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 cake is a lie!
- 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.
- Lets Meet The Meat ads in which the clients hunt the sentient food product are nightmarish because of this paradox: we are supposed to act this way toward the product ourselves, and the ads often make it The Wooble (perhaps unintentionally).
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.
The Judderman from a Schnappes/Metz campaign was officially judged one of the ten scariest things ever seen on TV, and with good reason. As far as this editor can tell, 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.
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...
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.
- For those familiar with The Wheel Of Time this troper and his wife always thought Mr. Six looked like Padan Fain. And now, the nightmares can commence once more.
- This troper finds him hilarious. He's like a wacky uncle.
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.
- This troper finds the sequence in which a "little deviant" scares a "sheeple" literally out of the sheeple's skin... which the "little deviant" proceeds to put on like a one-piece sweatsuit for the specific purpose of luring other sheeples into danger... to be the most disturbing element of the commercial.
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.
The Hero Quest ad from the early 1990s where one of the players turns into a monster at the end.
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. One magazine 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.
  - That guy being Patrick Warburton, who, while I can listen to him talk for days, does get slightly creepy in his monotone.
  - Just in case it wasn't already creepy enough.◊
- Those baby dolls with giant M&Ms for torsos.
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.
- Seanbaby provides what's probably hiding behind Bob's smile...
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?
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.'"
A Levi's advertisement in late 2001 featuring singing bellybuttons freaked this editor so much that she would run screaming (literally) whenever she heard the song "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 Nightmare Fuel in itself....
- 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...
  - Pause that ad at 0:26. The giant belly has two growths of some kind in its belly button. Nightmare Fuel level increased.
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.
  - What, you've never heard the old adage: "You don't buy beer, you rent it"? This troper is simply amused and confused that this particular gem was produced by a beer company...
  - That actually explains why beer is called "piss".
Candy commercials tend to invoke this trope a lot, for reasons we can't 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.
  - See here. A LOT of kids believed this one.
  - Which is EXACTLY why this Troper point blank refused to eat those evil candies as a kid! She's glad to know she isn't the only one who thought that.
  - Mourpride ones turn your head into a mooing cow head.
- 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!
- Candy commercials always seem to have Transformation Trauma in them.
- A recent Fruit by the Foot commercial features two kids replacing various things on the other's body into Fruit by the Foot. It isn't that bad until one of the kids turns the other's DNA into Fruit by the Foot. Yeah.
The Tetley teafolk ads scared this troper as well as the Pyramid tea ads with the monkey family in it.
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.
- And then Sprite goes and gives us blatant Nightmare Fuel in the form of their increasingly surreal "Sublymonal" Sprite ad campaign.
  - This Troper was so disturbed by the "Sublymonal" campaign that he encouraged a close friend of his to close his eyes and cover his ears during the theater run of it lest he suffer another psychotic episode.
- Another Sprite commercial seemed innocuous but made this troper shiver: it shows athletes drinking Sprite and then diving into the basketball court as if it was a swimming pool. But what would happen if it became solid again while they were still submerged?
- Sprite dives into Nightmare Fuel territory yet again with a recent ad that features people at a skate park running into each other and exploding into a huge spray of Sprite! Others nearby are showered in their spray and enjoy it! Seriously, watch this and try not to be creeped out. WTF, Sprite?
  - The being gleefuly showerd in their friend's explosion spray is the creepiest part. I mean, when you think about it, that's like being showered in blood and guts and internal organs after a car accident.
  - Actually, if you look closely, you can see the people who ran into each other enjoying the spray too, implying that the people don't become the spray, the collision only produces it. Still creepy either way.
This editor remembers being extremely freaked out by the bus-side commercials for the film version of 'The Grinch''. Just...those eyes.
- At the same time the movie was released, there was this Heinz ketchup commercial where a man turns into a green furry Grinch at one point after eating a hotdog with green ketchup on it. The full length version of the commercial is especially freaky, especially those puppet elf-like things. This troper got terrified by that part- especially seeing as they were singing a warped version of Jingle Bells or some other Xmas tune.
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!..."
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!". Even reading an article about how they created the "squashed up boy" effect didn't stop this troper from being disturbed.
- 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.
- That commerical scared the crap out of me and pretty much scared my childhood!
Does anyone else remember a Maytag commercial back in the '90s, where aliens came and did laundry? This troper remembers not being able to go in the laundry room by herself for at least two YEARS after seeing that commercial.
In the early '90s, there were these commercials for toys (whose names escape this troper at the moment) 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. This troper got especially freaked out when he saw some of them in the shops.
- So did this one. Unfortunately, various of her classmates actually owned them. They had horrible clammy rubbery skin...
- This troper says one of the ones he saw he had pop-up eyes and when you pressed him his tongue came out with a "mini" version of itself on it.
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.
For this troper, the Honey Monster, mascot of Sugar Puffs. Particularly the advert where a classroom of children turn into Honey Monsters. This troper wouldn't go down the cereals aisle at the supermarket for years afterwards, on the implication that seeing a box of Sugar Puffs would cause such a transformation.
- Yep. Those honey monster ads were very creepy. Especially seeing as the way the monster was designed. But the ones in the 1990's with a new Honey Monster designed by the Jim Henson Company were a lot nicer.
- Well, since you brought up disturbing honey-based cereal mascots, I got three words for you: '''''ME WANT HONEYCOMB!!'''''
  - AAAAGGGHHHHH! THE PAIN! Thanks, you just brought back a rush of horrible memories as a child trying to watch Pokemon, only for it to be erupted by a mutant screaming furball. Thanks.
This troper can't be the only one who finds something disturbing about the walking "mucus" mascot for Mucinex who inexplicably speaks with a Bronx accent.
There was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles commercial where a kid was sucked down the sink drain into the sewers. This troper's young sister refused to brush her teeth for a month. It took us half of that month to figure out why she was scared of the sink.
- Worse so if you know that something similar (albeit bloodier) happened in a horror movie.
This editor remembers a commercial for something that featured a man eating so much he exploded. Complete with the piles of food he had eaten splattering everywhere.
- This wasn't originally a commercial (though it may have been used for one later). It's from "Monty Python and the Meaning of Life" and has John Cleese offering this morbidly obese man called Mr Creosote the final mint that causes him to explode.
- The gag was used again for a commercial for the SNES game Yoshi's Island.
  - And also in a commercial involving a banker with piles of money.
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.
- Quite a few 2008 Superbowl ads carried potential Nightmare Fuel: The creepy "Godfather" parody Audi commercial, Pepsi's "Get Closer to Justin", Dorito's Mousetrap.
- Don't forget the one with Richard Simmons. (Shudders)
- 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.
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(?):
  - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIknza0XlDc&e The original troper's nightmare...
  - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEJzgoGH6s4&e "Windy office"
  - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlIzLasIYKs&e "Homeless"
  - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6GLH4X2Wm0&e "Lord of Mishap"
  - 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?
The singing penguin from those Bud commercials some years back. It broke into people's houses to steal their beer and fix them with a dead stare when it was spotted, crooning, "doobie doobie dooo..." This editor's cousin would run into her room screaming.
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.
This Apple Geeks webcomic has a good explanation of how the Kool-Aid Man can be Nightmare Fuel.
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 here.
- This troper clicked that link and was confronted by a large image of Two-Face... And then Despereaux ran by from out of nowhere and Two-Face was replaced by an astronaut.
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.)
- You forgot 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.
- A man named Kenneth Lamar Noid was apparently so traumatized by them he took it as a personal attack and held a Dominoes store hostage for five hours because of it.
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. This Troper didn't like Orangina to begin with, and is put off it forever.
- Others might disagree.
- This troper has never heard of it.
  - No, really. They're Not Making This Up.
  - AAAAHHHH MY EYES!!!
  - This troper would like to go boil her eyes nao. D: What was with the octopus woman???
  - Okay...What the hell? What were they on when they made it?
- Was I the only person to be disturbed somewhat by some of the bikini wearing dancers were peacocks not peahens ?
  - Not quite disturbed, but this troper definitely did a "Wait, they had crossdressers as booty girls?" double-take. Either someone was sneaking things in, or they Did Not Do The Research.
  - Or they were thinking of something like this◊...
- Apparently when looking for reference designs when making this ad, they looked up as much furry porn as possible.
  - ...but screwed up rather badly in the delivery.
- Was This Troper the only one who noticed a recurring theme involving males dousing females with yellow fluid from long cylindrical containers?
- Come to think of it was extremely weird. Yet again it is a French commercial so it's supposed to be like that. The French have a really twisted view on what they consider sexy.
- This troper thinks that people's Squick over this ad is related in some way to the Animation Age Ghetto - specifically, the "Furries are ruining our childhood!" part. Because cartoon animals are obviously only for children, any depiction of them acting in a sexy or grown-up way is seen as a perversion, likely to corrupt the youth of today, and all that garbage.
- The panda also had her shirt ripped off and...yeah. Kind of disturbing. This happens right before the aforementioned squid scene.
  - And in the opening, when the bear goes up to the kangaroo on the swing and he opens a bottle of the stuff, both take a look down at a certain lower part of his body before she wraps her legs around that area and then swings backwards. WTF?!?
The Ribena ads during the 90's that were quite similar to the Oragina ads only creepier because of the monsters in them.
- Not to mention Ribena's current British ad campaign, which shows friendly animated blackcurrants bouncing hopefully towards the Ribena factory (which this troper finds horrific in itself), talking to each other in excited little squeaks, surviving all kinds of oncoming dangers, only to be hideously dispatched in a massive splurt of ~~blood~~ juice as they reach the gates. The supposedly reassuring voiceover tells us that "don't worry, 90% of all Britain's blackcurrants make it". This is the similar, but far less chillingly cheerful cinema version.
- Bring back the purple clad Soul Brotha, please!
Also a 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.
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. This advert scared this troper to no end.
This troper remembers being scared by an ad for 102 Dalmations figurines as prizes in cereal. Especially the part where the little girl featured in it gets a Cruella-like hairstyle and laughs insanely at the end.
There's a particularly disturbing PSP ad in which people somehow turn into something resembling a tv and are played around with.
The California Raisins.
Ronald McDonald looks like a brightly coloured composite of Cesare and Gwynplaine.
- Truth In Television. Ronald came to this troper's school, this troper freaked out.
- Scroll down this page and take a look. *shudder*
- Have you seen Japanese Ronald McDonald? Not something I'd like to meet.
  - No, THIS is not something you'd like to meet.
  - You want scary? You REALLY want scary? Take the Japanese Ronald McDonald ad from above, and ad a little slice of Hell. Yeah. Good luck sleeping tonight.
  - Eureka! I've found it! The cure for Nightmare Fuel is...Fetish Fuel!
  - That would be scary for anyone who first saw it on television instead of Youtube, and gets blindsided by the fraction-of-a-second image at the end.
- Put a smile on...
- I defy you to -ever- go to McDonald's ever again.
  - Just in case that didn't do it for you.
  - Holy, holy shit.
  - Are you not scared yet? Now you are.
  - When something makes the Ring and Fruity Oaty Bars look sane...
One print ad for a video game this troper doesn't remember the name of 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.
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.
The ads for NINH which have people telling you about their violent behaviour in graphic detail scare this troper to no end.
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.
In the 1980s, there was this commercial for Nintendo games. Watch and be horrified.
- Your Mileage May Vary, since I watched that and just wondered when Dire Straits was going to start playing...
- Well it just so happens, fellow troper, that I was afraid of the Dire Straits music video in question (at least, the decapitated-head-in-the-microwave part), but that's for another page. Back to the Nintendo commercial, however: would you prefer the extended version... or the extended version with CREEPIER, EVEN MORE DISTORTED SOUND???
  - Okay, that's more like it.
There's a commercial for a beer called Tooheys Extra Dry in which a sleeping man's tongue slips out of his mouth and goes to a party to bring him beer. It had to be taken off the air because too many people were Squicked out by it, but this troper remembers being really creeped out by it.
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.
- 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.
- The "transplant one was pretty creepy too.
- 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 sugggests 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...
This editor recalls a Kirby's Dreamland commercial that got uncomfortable when it went to the part where Kirby, as an animation, inhaled a real-life human. This was disturbing since there was no indication that guy did anything bad. After a few showings, he was glad when the commercial stopped airing. Years later of not seeing that scene, he's over it now.
- If this editor recalls correctly, aforementioned human was dressed like a typical barbarian warrior and had been 'competing' with Kirby in tests of strength and heroics in between the shots of game Kirby blowing crap at Whispy Woods. This editor thought it was the craziest thing he ever saw, and then promptly forgot about it until just now.
- This troper remembers seeing (on You Tube, mind - the first Kirby's Dream Land game came out before I was born) a white - a la the official art for the first game - Kirby standing somewhere in a plain grayish area, standing next to some kinda biker punk, who was animated, making it less freaky than the original editor makes it out to be. The kicker, though, comes at the end, wherein Kirby pops up again - with muscles, teeth, and a visor, for absolutely no reason (the concept of copy abilities didn't come around until Kirby's Adventure, one year later). Yeahhhh. Messed. Up.
  - You two seem to be Completely Missing The Point — Kirby's Adventure and Kirby's Dream Land 2 both feature live humans getting eaten by Kirby thanks to the Roger Rabbit Effect.
  - Kirby and nightmare fuel seem to go together quite well. The moral of this commercial seems to be "Play Kirby, blow up like a balloon."
  - Actually Kirby was never nice to begin with.
This troper's cousin got extremely frightened by the DVD trailer for American Werewolf In London, especially that one part where we see Jack with yellow eyes and sharp teeth.
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.
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.
How about the creepy undead Orville Redenbacher popcorn commercials?
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.
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.
This troper finds certain Subway adverts disturbing, one of them featured an obese man using a scratch and win card and having his weight literally scratched off him. As one of the headlines on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno said- "Come to work for subway and have your dreams crushed like the rest of us".
- Rival sandwich shop Quizno's had a Nightmare Fuel ad featuring the freakily animated Spongemonkeys from rathergood.com.
  - In this troper's opinion, they did one worse. Two guys are sitting on a bench, and one looks at the other (who presumably went to Subway) and says something like "Untoasted? What, were you raised by wolves?" Cue flashback sequence of a grown human in a suit nursing from a wolf with her pups, and then the guy responds "Why, yes. Yes, I was." This troper saw it for the first time in the midst of a Sci-Fi Channel marathon with twenty other people in the room, and not a single person didn't cringe or gag.
  - As a complete aside, but an interesting bit of trivia, the guy who was raised by wolves was played by Jim Parsons, the same man who now plays Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory.
  - And the commercial that showed Chef Jimmy's starved-to-death parakeet.
- On the subject of Sci Fi Channel commercials, there's the Date Required commercial. in it two guys go to a club, but the bouncers say that all gentlemen must be escorted by a lady. The guy becomes an ugly woman, He ties his dress shirt into a half shirt and then begins rearranging his body. For example, the guy strains as he literally pushes the "fat" (complete with sound effects) from his stomach to his chest - at which point you see his breasts pop out. When he rearranges his hips, you hear the cracking of his hip bones. When he pulls his hair, you hear the hair stretching. And the bouncers let him and his friend in.
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. This troper can never watch those commercials again without hiding behind a couch, and that's saying something.
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."
- I believe you're thinking of the ad for ''Contra: Hard Corps''.
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.
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.
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... That said, though, this troper and his cousins and sister adopted "PICK...IT...UP!!" as an amusing family catchphrase.
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. Ugh.
- Actually this troper was going to mention it if nobody had yet. This troper would cover her ears and close her eyes, much to the amusement of her own mother, who would often lie and say it was over when it wasn't. She did the same thing when the tales from the crypt guy would pop out of his coffin, the only time he scared her as a child. She had to learn the music until it was time to cover her ears because of it!
- Hell, this troper's mother was disgusted by that ad—and she's a nurse!
- This troper was wigged out by Data doing the exact same thing with his own fingernails in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Fortunately he didn't need that particular control that much.
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.
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.
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 - This Troper was terrified of them at the time.
- Oh yeah. That rings a lot of bells.
- It gets even creepier when you remember that in Fritz Lang's M, "In the Hall of the Mountain King" was the leitmotif for the child-killer.
Spit out that Stride gum... or we'll find you. This gum company sets up Xanatos Roulettes, able to arrange (and perfectly time) freak accidents like zoo animals bushwhacking you on the street.
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.
The Playstation 2 ad I am the wolfman. Which looks very Tim Burton-esque.
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.
This troper's older brother remembers being disturbed by the 80s Doritos ads with Jay Leno in them. Especially the computer one.
This troper is seriously creeped out by the Dr. Scholl's Freeze-Away Wart Remover commercials featuring a CGI or stop-motion (hard to tell which) wart straight out of the Uncanny Valley.
I don't remember which brand, but 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.
This troper can NOT believe Snuggle from the Snuggle fabric softener commercials isn't here, that damn bear gave her actual nightmares! The worst she had was when he had rubies instead of eyes and he stalked her in a library, one of her favorite places.
- Parodied by MTV's old sketch-comedy show The State, in which a housewife terrified by the sudden appearance of a talking stuffed animal proceeds to bludgeon Snuggle with an iron.
- This troper actually felt sorry for the Snuggle bear after seeing a Robot Chicken skit in which the bear gets molested by some random guy who keeps saying that the bear is so soft.
This troper remembers a radio 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.
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.
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.
The Play Station 3 "Baby" ad. The entire series of those 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 PS 3 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 Play Station levitates in mid-air. Watch it here
- Oh... God... why the hell did I watch that? *runs screaming to her Mummy*
The latest AT&T commercial, with butterflies. Butterflies themselves don't freak me out, but OH MY GOD that ad is creepy.
Vintage advertisements. Oh, the creepiness of vintage advertisements. Children that will eat your soul after finishing their Pork & Beans]. A human-headed pig advertising a product to make "children and adults as fat as pigs." Carrot men and pigs slicing themselves into sausage.
- 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.
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. Brrr.
- This troper only vaguely remembers the arm-ripping and coffee melting. Though perhaps it has to do with the fact that TV ads in his country tend to get cut short (to allow more ads between shows, go figure) after being shown for the first time. He would rather not see the full commercial again. Also, you forgot the part where he gives his hand in a chocolate box to a hospitalized woman.
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.
The ad for the upcoming sci-fi/horror game Dead Space. The images are scary enough. The fact that the game is almost certainly going to be full of Nightmare Fuel in its own right adds to it. But the clincher? Someone singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" in the background.
- 'Had completely the opposite effect on This Troper. Quickly got bored with the gory imagery, but all the while was loving the version of the rhyme being sung. Remarkably evocative, enjoyable, and inspiring.
This troper remembers one from a few years ago where a guy in high school gets the girl he's sweet on after classes to come into the art room, where he reveals a bust of her. Made out of starburst candies. Then he starts making out with it. So far, just weird. But then he starts eating it.
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.
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.
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. The first time this troper saw it, he was legitimately surprised at the commercial's ending. Later, the terrifying music was replaced with cutesy cartoon music, and newer versions occur in much brighter settings, with the family-friendly comedy supposedly there all along. Still, in the second commercial, featuring a little girl who looks creepy in both monster and sauce-splattered human form, the cute music only makes it creepier.
This Troper has noticed 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.
This troper has never watched long enough to figure out what it was advertising, but... the freaking talking thumbs with faces. My eyes bleed...
- What, like Thumb Wars?
- Perhaps you mean this commercial for an AT&T phone.
- "That's insanium in the cranuim, DAWG!" I don't think anyone over the age of ten says that.
  - Or under the age of ten, for that matter. Or even at the age of ten.
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.
- It's their expressions that get this troper. Their happy,mindless expressions.
Here comes Pete he's a meat puppet... a meat puppet... a PUPPET OF MEAT. This viral video from Diesel Jeans proves that jeans companies are evil tools of demons who want to EAT YOUR SOUL.
That Benylin Mucus Cough advert with the green monkey clawing some man's chest would have terrified me if I were 5 years old.
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?!
- Since you brought it up: "They're sending T-Rex". Yep, Nightmare Fuel about Nightmare Fuel. Yay, memories!
- 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.
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...
What about the Energizer Bunny? *shudders*
- This troper had a literal nightmare after seeing this commercial where an assassin is hired to kill the Energizer Bunny. She always thought he was cute and cuddly. Oddly enough, in the dream she succeeded in killing him...and was afterwards afraid of the Energizer Bunny.
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.
This Troper'd rather not link to it, but there's an ad on the Buster Brown page on The Other Wiki that is truly scary beyond all reason and sanity.
- Well, if you won't I will!
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.
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, gave this troper nightmares.
This troper saw an ad on one of those "World's Funniest Commercials" shows in the mid-90s that gave her nightmares for weeks.
- Wait...was the show you were watching called "World's Funniest Commercials" or "Commercial For Soundgarden Music Videos"?
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.
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 freaks me out.
- Me too, the boy is okay, but the girl has "a stare of death" about her.
This troper recalls seeing a commercial for an antibacterial wipe (can't remember which brand) that featured a woman walking into her kitchen, with some generic crowd sounds in the background. As she takes one of the wipes out of its container, the crowd falls silent... and then starts screaming in terror as she wipes down the counter, implying that the germs were simply minding their own business before she unflinchingly massacred them.
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.
- I saw a similar version that freaked me out. It had a girl instead of a boy, and took place in a gymnasium or something. It started out nice and calm with soft music as the girl saw someone else eating one, and the girl seemed calm until it went like the previous one, with the girl's head going into freaky claymation style yelling "I WAAAAAAAANT OOOOOONE!!!" in a similar manner, complete with the mouth zooming up to the screen, but in a higher-pitch. The "Got a craving?" ending was even similar.
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.
This troper remembers a poster advertising fried chicken, consisting of a drawing of a rooster in a pimp suit and a chicken dressed as a prostitute.
This troper recently saw one of those pre-movie ads for some car that involved a gang fight with CAT PEOPLE. Not nifty anime-style catpeople, either. More like regular people with cat heads. There are no words for how creepy that was.
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." This troper had to leave the room or change the channel every time this ad came on, and really is not inclined to ever get anywhere near a pair of Levi's again.
IMVU advertisements. Uncanny Valley and Erection Rejection to the max! They're everywhere on the Net, and they're out to get 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. What was disturbing for this troper was not only the disgusting noises of chicken consumption, but the implication that this act could be performed on anything, including but not limited to the cat and the family. By a piece of meat.
There was an M&Ms commercial in The Nineties where an anthropomorphic chocolate bar flirts with a girl by the poolside, while the M&M mascots look on. Surely enough, the poor chocolate bar melts from the sun, while the girl voices the viewer's reaction: "EW!". The tagline? "M&Ms melt in your mouth, not in your lounge chair." Obviously, it was worth killing a poor, innocent chocolate bar to tell us that, wasn't it?
- This one from the 70s isn't much better. Frightening on so many levels.
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).
This Troper was watching TV and suddenly a Cadbury Creme Eggs commercial comes on. Being a fan of the candy in question, she wanted to see their new twist. In the first spot, one of the aforementioned eggs is on a garbage can, then pushes a weight off onto the pedal and is smashed against the wall behind him. The second ad is similarly suicidal, except it features a Newton's Cradle and a pseudosexual sigh of relief when the egg kills itself. The third, with the most potential, is actually the most tame: the egg decides to try polevaulting into a blender, but gets to the edge and falls, smashing on the floor. It's safe to say that these commercials are the first to truly disturb the troper in question.
- Let's not forget their latest incarnation as murderous, goo-spewing monsters.
There was a recent commercial for a soft drink (the name of which escapes this troper) 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....
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...
For this troper, it's all about the Peperami adverts. Peperami, a pepperami-like snack sausage, is anthropomorphised in a series of TV spots with the surprisingly honest tagline, "It's a bit of an animal". As if the literal interpretation of the tagline wasn't Nightmare Fuel already, in the most infamous advert the claymation sausage screams and then grates his upper body off with a cheese grater, collapsing with the loss of his head.
This troper clearly remembers being absolutely petrified of Annette Funicello in a series of Skippy peanut butter commercials from the mid-'80s. She was five at the time, and every time one of those commercials came on TV, she would hide under a blanket until it was over.
The Mike's Hard Lemonade commercials from the late '90s in which a guy grows a second, evil head.
Go humans go◊
- 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."
  - Or he's encouraging us to make the most of our head start.
  - This troper saw that ad on a billboard...directly above this one...
Is this Troper the only one who is completely terrified of the Wazoo Bar commercial? You know, the one with the taste buds? *shudder*
- You're not alone... those commercials make my tongue feel... strange in the worst way possible.
Here is the single creepiest cake commercial ever. Carvel's Wish.
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.
This Dunkin' Donuts ad. Children slowly, creepily being dragged into the TV— a bit too reminiscent of "Smile Time" for comfort...
The Nicorette ad with the guy's mouth escaping from his face and running away.
The cellphone company Koodo has new ads out. The people are on cellphones and have huge, HUGE mouths and it reminds this troper of that jaw scene from Mirrors YOU KNOW THE ONE. Thus she gets freaked out every time she sees said ads. Which unfortunately is often.
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.
The Jolly Green Giant is cultivating and selling his own kind as food. And why? Why is he doing this? Was he ostracized as a child for being half-human? Is he bitter about being called "Corn Dog" as a child, since he was vegetable on the outside and meat on the inside? And now he's indoctrinating Little Sprout, another of his kind, so that his reign of evil may continue!
Lectric Shave, featuring disturbing cgi hair faces.
A French commercial for Frosted Flakes, otherwise known as Frosties. This shows a man acting like a tiger from eating the cereal, but gets caught by Indians to use as a human skin rug. It's supposed to be played for laughs, but it's really disturbing.
This troper (for reasons unknown even to her) can't stand extreme close-ups of mouths, especially mouths that are talking, singing, chewing, etc. She very nearly vomited after seeing a commercial for a local classic rock radio station that consisted of a close-up of a woman's mouth lip-synching a variety of seventies rock songs.
This White Castle commercial is supposed to 'seduce' people into trying their new burger, but it just scares the living daylights out of this troper. It doesn't seem very wise to air it amidst the whole swine flu scare, either.
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?
This troper doesn't know if it was a brand advertisement, yet another American Dairy Association ad, or even a war morale poster, but this◊ image from the top of Blessed Are The Cheesemakers is certainly nightmare fuel.
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?
To say nothing of the "Respect The Pouch" Capri Sun campaign where kids are turned into bobbleheads, or whoopee cushions, or develop holes poked on them based on the way they disrespected the pouch.
And those Toyota Prius commercials with the happy humming, and the sun/earth/trees/road made of happily swaying people in grass costumes.
While in France, I saw a series of advertisements in the metro for various drinks and snack foods featuring 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. I think they were meant to be sexy somehow, but they were just extremely disturbing - especially when you think about Furry guys who probably did find them extremely sexy.
- You mean like catgirls? Yeah, only we furries find them attractive.
  - Us normal people do not find catgirls sexy with actual cat faces. We need a human face. How do you even kiss a cat? Gross!
  - The considerate gentleman begins with the whiskers...
Those Bing.com "search overload" commercials scare the hell out of This Troper, particularly that one with the airplane terminal. People staring blankly ahead, helplessly reciting loosely linked definitions? Nooooo thanks.
- I'm glad I wasn't the only one. Christ, that was so creepy, especially the one where the teenage girl asks her dad about a new cell phone, and then her mom starts doing it too...
  - On the other hand, they've given us a great way to keep kids from pestering us about buying them one.
  - These ads were cranked up to 11 in a recent christmas ad, a boy asking a mall santa for an Xbox 360 suddenly turns into a freaking zombie movie when everyone around him starts doing it, including a group of carolers who end their version of jingle bells with "Shruken Head" with the boy looking like he's going to cry, brrr.
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 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.
This Coca-Cola Open Happiness advert ... apparently, Your Mileage May Vary, but I honestly think it's pretty terrifying.
ThisTroper's got some old tapes from the area's current My Network (then FOX) affiliate's broadcasts of Star Trek reruns that he has gone through mostly for commercials and has seen some SCARY commercials for the region's psychiatric institute hotline (some of which have audio of a frightened call over a black slide with the logo). Ironically, I checked one of my You Tube channels and found two relatively tame versions as I haven't brought myself to stick the really scary version up...yet.
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.
Snuggle Fabric Softener's mascot. The old puppet one was cute, but this new computer-generated one is right there in the Uncanny Valley.
ThisTroper has seen some commercials off a few old (1989-vintage) Star Trek The Original Series tapes from a local station where occasionally an ad for a regional psychiatric institute would pop up with varying degrees of creepiness. I even uploaded one on my You Tube account ([1]). That's mild compared to the version that simply had a slide with a call.
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?
For some reasone, this troper is some-what disturbed by that talking pizza in that new pocket plate commercial
This troper cannot believe that the creepy Hulu.com alien commercials have not been brought up yet.
- The Alec Baldwin one probably is 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 goat in this video ad for Gatorade.
The commercials for the Palm Pre feature a woman who is just way too calm. So much so that this troper initially assumed that she was evil and was acting calm to lure you closer so she can tear out your throat.
- Perhaps that unnervingly calm woman is actually Johan Liebert from Monster cross dressing as his twin sister, and he's only partaking in that commercial so that he can mind rape and kill everyone in the studio after filming gets complete. Sweet dreams!
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.
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.
- A recent ad that I've 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.
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.
You know those Priceline commercials? The one with the Negotiator dude? This troper loves those commercials, all save for one. The most recent one involves the guy dropping a laughing gas bomb into a guy's room. The guy starts laughing, and the Negotiator drops in, and says "Saving money is no laughing matter" as the guy's laughter getting more and more paranoid and hysterical. The Negotiator then starts laughing as well. That's unnerving enough, but do you want to know the really scary part? That poor guy is watching someone break and enter, and all he can do about it is laugh. The mind-bendingly scary part? The idea that both the Negotiator and the man are stuck laughing hysterically forever. WAY too many shades of Joker Venom for this troper.
- Successfully turned into Nightmare Retardant with this riff on Shatner's line:
Shatner: "Saving money is no laughing matter."
You as Shatner: "My career trajectory, on the other hand, is."
Orkin currently has a series of commercials in which a creepy person repeatedly tries to get into suburban homes using a variety of flimsy stories, such as delivering a pizza, his car broke down and he wants to call his brother, etc. The creepy part is that the person is a six-foot tall termite. Not guy in a cute costume, but a giant, talking termite that sounds like a serial killer. One assumes someone thought it would be funny, perhaps they wanted it to be just a little creepy but what they managed was "Giant alien insects are going to try and con their way into your homes to rape you and dangle your intestines from the ceiling". That would suffice better for an ad for a new shotgun.
In another singularly nauseating example of talking body parts, Specsavers screened an ad in the Netherlands which featured a pair of eyes that directly addressed viewers, moving as if lip-synched.
- 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?
This delightful print ad,◊ found in a Seattle-area phone book. Sleep tight, kids!
This Xbox commercial. At least to This Troper. How could a baby spent all of his life naked and flying like that?
This troper remembers a commercial for Tagament she saw as a four-year-old that featured a sleeping couple and a pizza hovering over their bed. Then the pizza turns into a monster, accompanied by a Scare Chord.
American Express anyone◊?
- American Express, again. Some might call it cute, but there's definitely a little unsettling about faces in EVERYTHING.
  - That add is all the creppier due to the song making an apperance on possibly the most disturbing DVD menu EVER.
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."
This troper can't even remember what the ad was for, but she still has nightmares about those goddamn rapping, skating babies.
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 1980s ad for the home versions of Q-Bert featured a WASP-y family of four who, over the course of playing the game, gradually turned into Q-Berts. This troper couldn't sleep that night.
The incredibly creepy commericals for Assassin's Creed 2 with glazed eyes of dead assassinated victims staring straight at the screen. This troper saw one in the middle of the night...who needs sleep anyway?
- 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?
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)?
I was browsing the site when this ad hit me in the face. You'll need a ladder; the person pictured falls far in the Uncanny Valley.
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? Watch them here in this compilation
- 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...
What happens when you get Creepy Children to pitch a product? ''Lionel Coin Bank Lionel Coin Bank Lionel Coin Bank
There's nothing (that this troper knows of) particularly disturbing about this Japanese Ronald Mc Donald commercial. That is, until somebody messed with it a little. Especially if you have a clown phobia, be VERY afraid of this link.
This Lee jeans ad that aired during the 1993 Super Bowl. Some people might find this ad more funny than scary, but for this Troper, the sight of that man's face coming closer and closer to the screen as he inhales to squeeze into his jeans was the most frightening thing I've ever seen on a TV screen. It's been 17 years since I've seen it, and it still gives me the creeps.
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.

Public Service Announcements

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.
- Links to the original and the remake.
- This troper watched the '70s version and nearly jumped out of skin himself. Now convinced this commercial is what made him terrified of Smokey the Bear to the extent he couldn't be in the same room with a St B book...
A recent health and safety advert featuring a man and The Grim Reaper who is—surprisingly—in a farm vehicle instead using a scythe, disturbs this troper a lot.
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.
Public service announcements seem to have this down VERY well. On the Uncanny Valley side of nightmare fuel, see our brothers in France. This rather NSFW (and by rather I mean quite) French animated safe sex PSA, which I'm sure you've all seen. It's sickeningly, shockingly cute and light-hearted- I almost became a fan on sight- and then goes into scary bizarro-land pretty fast. Pretty much the only parts that made sense involved guys making out. The rest is all a blur of fear and simultaneous uncanny attraction. Bizarre, inappropriately hilariously animated sex acts?Thinly veiled symbolism? The sexiest cartoon character ever to scramble his way out of the Uncanny Valley and seduce you AND your boyfriend? One either laughs, or cries in terror and crushes their monitor with a cinderblock.
- At least it (apparently) ends happily. Traditional PSA fare would have you fall in love with the hard-luck guy, only to show him five years later, wasted away and dying of AIDS. Actually, one might be unsure if this is really an AIDS PSA and not a trailer for a new Sims expansion pack: Boys'n'Bears (Woohoo Safely)! Of equal WTF/endearing ground is the "straight" analog.
  - What's weirdest about the (adorable) straight analogue is how much the unlucky girl looks like Ginny Weasley. That's it- off to write some fic...
  - This blew my mind.
- It is almost impossible to tell what the message is, for either version. Ukes are discriminated against for stealing dolls, condoms are usable as chewing gum, your first love will break up with you after hot sex, everyone else is an S&M rapist with a prettyguy facade, and the only guys worth being a long-term significant other are hot doctors who will make out with their much-younger patients who are still in traction? Guys will ignore you unless you have breasts and a short skirt, erotic asphyxiation is the key to good kissing, love disappears after having safe sex, you should use an uneccessarily large condom (if you have a tiny penis) or a comically large condom (if you're black), and the best way to meet a good future significant other is to mope around rainy, dark alleyways? Oh, that second-and-a-half flash of Screen Full o' Text explains everything- Safe sex is teh win! ...What?
- What this troper took away from that commercial is that when Xbox 360 Avatars grow up, they become gay Kingdom Hearts characters that chew condoms like bubble gum and ride on penis-shaped roller coasters...
- Seen the French safe-sex adverts where the person is having sex with a giant scorpion? Squick. Nightmare Fuel. With their powers combined, they are Captain Destroy-All-Interest-In-Sex-And-Cause-Arachnophobia-Simultaneously!
  - Oh...you mean this one?◊ You're welcome.
- Perhaps more in line with 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!
When This Troper was a child, she once saw an ad for a vaccine against an illness she can't recall. It featured a camera following a man in a suit from behind, then he turns and has the face of the bacteria the vaccine works against. She still shudders at the mere memory after more than 20 years, OMG OMG OMG. T-T
The Montana Anti-Meth Project ads are pretty serious nightmare fuel, probably the only anti-drug ads to be anything but self-parody. In one, a kid says "I'll try it just once," then the camera pans around to reveal dozens of emaciated, dirty people laughing out loud in a filthy drug den. In another, a girl is about to take a shower before going to a party and doing meth. She opens the shower and sees a version of herself, only scarred, dirty, and covered with sores, cringing in the bathtub and saying "don't do it."
- Oh, fuck yes. Hell, even some o the billboards and magaine ads they made were disturbing. Like one that was an image of a razor sitting in a blood-splattered sink. The text mentioned that a side effect of too much meth was the belief that there were bugs under your skin, and "you'll try to cut them out." Guh. (This troper's school had a visit from one of the spokespeople, who said she could not show us any of the actual commercials because they were too disturbing. For high-school seniors.
When she was young, this troper once saw an animated commercial supporting recycling. In it, 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.
- Man, and I thought The Happening was bad.
Just in case anybody happened to forget where the Challenger Center for Space Science Education got their name, they made a TV spot playing the audio of the disaster- with the astronauts' voices and everything- over a black screen... until the moment of the explosion, THEN they throw those images of the smoke and fire in your face!
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.
The Stroke warning signs adverts: a small hole forming on person's head, on fire as a metaphor for the brain damage caused by a stroke... Not pretty.
- The one with the scary black guy saying he's going to kick my ass and leave me for dead, then he says he's a stroke is worse. It's hard to pay attention to the message when I'm busy hiding under my desk in a fetal position, crying.
Wash your hands with soap and water...OR IT WILL TURN INTO A DEMON-INFESTED Body Horror!
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". This troper is 20 years old, and yet he finds it disturbing. Now imagine what a little kid would think!
- 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.
As you can see, there aren't any.
- Well, why don't you help, Dr. Manhattan?
  - I don't think you'd want Dr. Manhattan to help out. The guy flashes everybody.
This troper remembers an old commercial taken off the air mere days after it was aired. In it, a kid uses the bathroom and decides not to wash his hands. This is where things become rather disturbing. His arm and head are viciously mutilated as the bacteria on his hands grows out of control and seem to merge with his skin. The kid screams and runs into the bathroom, and 2 seconds later a large deformed foot stomps over. The message, "Beware the bacteria" appears on screen.
If you were a kid in the 80's or 90's in Finland, you WILL remember the creepy Varokaa heikkoa jäätä (Beware of thin ice) PSA and most likely were traumatized by it. If the psychedelic style and music and the bear's face when he fell weren't enough to make you run behind the couch, the way the bear says the warning at the end surely took care of that.
This troper lives in Kansas, therefore tornados are prominent where she lives. While she attended elementary school, her school's tornado siren would go off every Monday noon during the spring as a drill, and it would absolutely terrify her. The siren’s haunting rising and falling whine would still be terrifying even when it was absolutely sunny and clear outside, which was usually when the drills occurred so no one would mistaken it for an actual tornado warning. During actual warnings when the sky was green and the new's local weatherman warned everyone in this troper's particular area to go into their basements NOW, she would almost shit her pants. Nowadays it really doesn’t help that those tornado sirens sound similar to the air raid sirens in Silent Hill, which also go off during ominous weather and foreshadow horrific events.
This Canadian Public Service Announcement. Why be yourself, when you can be me?
The monster puppets from that Canadian PSA by Concerned Children Broadcasters are indeed scary for the kids.
Hulu has a couple of seriously bizarre Global Warming awareness ads. One has a series of Creepy Children saying "tick" in a Creepy Monotone, with the last one saying "time's up." The other has a little girl in a variety of creepy locations with creepy imagery surrounding her, with the shots passing by so quickly as to be practically seizure-inducing. At the end, also in a Creepy Monotone, she says "Is this what you meant when you promised me the world?" Brr.

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?!
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?
This troper found this pic on a Youtube video, on the side where the usual advertisement goes. However, this looks like something out of Courage the Cowardly Dog. I uploaded it on Deviant Art, however. Click if Thou dare.
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,must of ad who portray the clients like bastard(Lucky Charm, Trix,etc)are Nightmare Fuel of sort because of the diminisment of the very person who consume the product the ad try to sell.
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 od would think on their next visit to grandma.
I feel bad for anyone who saw the commercial for Aphex Twin's album drukqs in a dark room.
- ... Or in a lit room... Or in ANY Room...*shudder*
24-Hour News Network France24 created an ad campaign called "Everything You Don't Want To Know," reflecting how emotionally draining the news can be. However, the ad campaign is total Nightmare Fuel combined with Soundtrack Dissonance. Cute music plays to CGI cartoons of child labour factories or even a girl talking to the camera, who turns out to be the gravesite of a loved one, before she leaves into a smoking Bad Future skyline.
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 enough Nostalgia Critic, 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...)
  - They made a new, COMPUTER ANIMATED version of that commercial...
Commercials for the Bissell Pro Life 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.
Tarako Kewpie Pasta Sauce. Easily the most terrifying way to sell pasta.
This troper remembers a PSA against smoking that had an older woman with a tracheotomy hole in her throat. That was bad enough, but then she picks up a still-burning cigarette and places it in the hole! Bothered this troper for a long time.
While probably not nightmare fuel, the smoker's hotline ad featuring people trapped in giant cigarrettes is kinda disturbing.
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 PS 3 baby was sitting on the middle of the dinner or coffee table.

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