Fridge Horror/Advertising

• Main
• Haiku
• Laconic
• Quotes
• All Subpages
  • Theme Parks
• Create New

Warning: It probably isn't a good idea to read this if you are the one who does the shopping for your household.

---

• In a Charter TV commercial, a man is sitting in his arm chair puzzled by the remote control. The advert talks about their DVR and so forth, ending by saying that the record button will not cause the house to blow up or other such effects. It then gives the remote combination for blowing the house up and the man tries it, causing the house to blow up and him to land safely on his lawn. That's fine until you remember that he brushed the child's toy off of the chair before he sat down. He just blew up at least two other people.
• There is a Sprite commercial that shows people walking into each other and jumping into crowds. And then they explode into thousands of droplets of Sprite and splash the bystanders. Which implies that if you drink Sprite, you are drinking people...
• The same could be applied to a recent razor commercial which showed the cartridge announcing that it was time to change itself out, and cheerfully yelling as it was being shot off the handle into the trash.
  • Even worse is the Electrashave commercial, in which hundreds of hairs with the same face as the guy they're on get shaved off. And they enjoy it!
• Bug spray commercials tend to anthropomorphize insects into talking, sometimes singing bugs that are cheerfully killed by a compound not too dissimilar to nerve gasses like Sarin.
• In a Skittles commericial, three kids are shown thousands of feet in the air sitting on top of a rainbow while eating skittles. When one of them begins to wonder if the rainbow exists or not, the part of the rainbow he's sitting on opens like a trap door and he begins falling out of the sky while the others showing little to no concern. Although it's not shown, we already know what's going to happen next...
• Those "Disrespectoids" commercials for Capri Sun that have the kids transforming into inanimate objects for doing something bad to the drink pouch. It's supposed to be funny, but then you realize that these kids are going to be like this for the rest of their lives.
  • A recent one has a girl turn into a living sand sculpture, and her arm falls off and dissolves. She is standing near the tide, so it stands to reason that sooner or later she'll completely dissolve into sand, and maybe still be alive.
  • Thankfully, it's a little better in the games and flash cartoons, where we get to see that the kids are actually getting along fairly well, Sandy Mandy included. Although, it's hard to say for Pancake Peggy, who doesn't even seem capable of moving around much...
• Jelly Babies. How cute, a baby... which you will promptly bite the head, torso and legs off of, not necessarily in that order.
• What about the Jolly Green Giant? Think about it: 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!
• During the fifties, Jim Henson made a series of commercials for Wilkins Coffee, featuring a proto-Kermit named Wilkins and another Muppet named Won'tkins. The general plot of a commercial was thus: Wilkins asks Won'tkins to have Wilkins Coffee, Won'tkins refuses, Wilkins murders Won'tkins. The implications here are quite clear: buy Wilkins Coffee, or Kermit will murder the shit out of you! Don't believe me? See for yourself!
  • In other Muppet-Advertising Fridge Horror, Miss Piggy was once EATING BACON in an advert for Denny's, and Pepe the King Prawn was spokesman for Long John Silver. So Piggy and Pepe want you to eat their family members. Kermit, on the other hand, refused to be the spokesperson for a frog legs restaurant in the Muppet Movie.
• McDonald's once proudly advertised that their Chicken McNuggets were "now" made with white meat. So what part of the chicken were we eating before? Good question.
• A commercial for Acorn Stairlifts portrays an old man walking down the stairs with his cane, but he drops it down and he's stuck. It then cuts to the man riding down the stairs on the stair lift from the same position he was in when he dropped his cane... with the cane still on the floor. Was he stuck on that stairwell the entire time until the Stairlift was installed?
• This Axe commercial is disturbing enough in its own right, but a Cracked.com commentator gives us an even more upsetting fact to add to this:

"Chocostein has not appeared able to express any emotion other than the trauma inducing frozen grin; so for all we know, he might be screaming in horrible pain from the inside, begging for death."

• The Mini Wheat commercials. They seem a little happy with the singing and what not, considering we're going to eat them alive. It doesn't help that the new product is "Mini-Wheats Mini-Bites".
• The recent Goldfish commercials. They may seem light hearted, but once you realize that one goldfish is basically putting his friends and family up to be eaten by us, they don't seem as happy as they used to.
  • The Goldfish commercials have always been creepy. "The wholesome snack that smiles back -- until you bite their heads off!"
• The recent Cinnamon Toast Crunch commercial where they keep trying to lick/eat one another is basically an instance of cannibalism.
• Any "anthromorphic food" ads; the happy pig selling barbeque, the Happy Meal guys, etc. The whole cheerful, sentinent, wants to be eaten, and sometime alive is pervasive and horrifying.
• M&M's commercials, especially the recent ones depicting individual M&M's trying desperately to hide themselves from humans who want nothikng more than to mash them apart with their teeth. Seeing the look of pure horror on their colorful faces is enough to make anyone think twice about that next handful...well, maybe...
• The adverts in the UK for Mazuma, a company that specialise in recycling old unwanted mobile phones and throwing a bit of money your way for the trouble. The cute little cartoon phones happily leap into the envelope, but no mention is made of what horrors happen when the envelope is opened in the recycling plant and the phones are gutted for their parts...
• Four words: Snickers. Peanut. Butter. Squared. [1]
  • What's probably worse is that this company is willing to feed their own employees (or possibly even unwitting volunteers they picked off the street) to sharks for a profit.
• The Mucinex commercials feature anthropomorphized mucus that are moving into a human's lungs, throwing family reunions, and playing with their children. At the end of the commercial, with the aid of Mucinex, the human coughs up the mucus, evicting them from their lungs. Congratulations, you just made an entire family homeless.
  • It's OK, we're obviously supposed to hate the guy because he looks like a disgusting working class luddite. Or maybe he's supposed to be a jew? Lesson: evicting the mucus wouldn't be OK if it were a respectable middle class family.
• Trix: children starve a rabbit, insisting that their cereal is for them and not to be consumed by rabbits.
• This commercial for gushers has a kid with gushers for an eye. Everybody loves him because his eye is so delicious...
• This troper remember an ad for Campbell's Soup that involves a snowman melting away from the warmth of the soup into a little boy. The Fridge Horror comes at you when you think about how he got that way...
• The recent Swiffer commercials. You mean I'm sweeping up and then throwing away tiny people?
  • Tiny people who are actually enjoying being swept up and thrown away...because they equate being carried away by a cleaning product with true love.
• The commercials for Dow Bathroom Cleaner with scrubbing bubbles. You have all these sophisticated, anthropomorphic bubble-creatures meticulously cleaning up a bathtub. But they all get washed down the drain at the end, with an echoic, signature "...so you don't have toooooo....." emanating from the pipes. Mister Rogers actually wrote a song to allay kids' fears of going down bathtub drains.
• In a commercial for Ancestry.com a woman says, I believe, her "great great(?) grandmother had five children and only one survived. It can be so easy to forget just how lucky you are." I used to think she meant that she was lucky she didn't lose four out of five children like that woman; but I later saw it a different way: did she mean she was lucky that one child survived for her to descend from?
• There this one Buffalo Wild Wings commercial in which one of the employees pulled a switch to inform a power plant worker to shut off all power in the entire city except for the restaurant itself. A city that includes hospitals with patients hooks up to respiratory systems or babies in life support.
  • YMMV on this one, too. Hospitals have backup generators on-site specifically to keep from being crippled by outages.
• A commercial for an insurance company shows people being inspired to commit random acts of kindness by seeing others do the same. The ad starts with a woman preventing a distracted pedestrian from wandering into traffic. A driver sees this and is nice to someone else later, which is seen by another person who...yada yada yada. In the penultimate scene, a man at an airport helps an elderly gentleman retrieve his suitcase. This is witnessed by...the same woman from the first act of kindness, and the last scene sees her saving a distracted pedestrian from wandering into traffic. Dear God. What kind of cyclic hellscape have we wandered into here?
  • Yet again, YMMV. It's supposed to be cyclic, showing that good deeds will always come back to you in the end. Don't see how that's a hellscape.
• A commercial for Chef Boyardee has a girl picking a can of the stuff out of the grocery store, only for her mom to put it back as they've had Chef all week. Luckily for the girl, the can gains sentience and rolls all the way home towards her. That's cute, until you realize the mom is gonna think that she stole it. Better hope the can is capable of explaining itself, too!
• A commercial for a cell phone company has two parent phones cooing over their new baby phone. While remarking about how much better their child is, another phone in the nursery has a low signal and a battery runs out on a third and shuts off.
  • Speaking of cellphones, extend the Verizon Galaxy Nexus commercial using the same sort of thinking. These real life friends rush into various circles when the phone categorizes them. Now, what happens when people get deleted from your contact list?
    • Also, all his friends are in a category, but there's nobody in his circle besides him.
• The Jell-O Temptations ads are full of this. Abusive Parents played for laughs.
  • Also, if the kids are punished like that for eating goddamn pudding, what would their parents do if they did something genuinely bad?
• The Bing commercials, where you have all these people looking blankly ahead reciting random information in a blank voice. While one sane person looks around in utter horror.
  • The Christmas one especially as you see the little kid get more and more desperate to find a non-pod person.
• I forget what the company was, but in the late '90s/early 2000's (forget which), there was a commercial for high speed internet. A guy who had it proudly proclaimed that due to the fast internet connection, he had been across the internet and back. If you think about it, that could mean he looked at every single site on the internet, which means every twisted, disgusting porn site (including the underage variety...), every shock site, every hate site, and probably downloaded everything illegal in existence. Yikes.
• In one of the early American commercials for the Nintendo DS commercials the protagonist is almost omnipotent with his touch-powers. There is a lot of Horror looking at the portrayed sketches. In one of them there are 5 guys in the showers, and 2 trow their towels at the portagonist, and laugh at them, it is later seen that he shrinks their reprodoctive organs, not enough to make them insusable or infertile, but enough to socially kill the guys in the showers, and the event was traumatising not only for the guys in the shower, but also for this Troper. Now imagine the rejections of future potential girlfriend, or the daily controntations these guys must face for the REST OF THEIR LIVES, only 2 were actually teasing the protagonist so the rest are just being the Victimized Bystander, they will all probably get into depressions, and 1 of them might commit suicide in the short term, and the rest maybe in long terms since they will no longer able to lead normal lives anymore. Later in the same commercial the protagonist is featured moving a plane to form a heart-shape, and you see the pilot and the co-pilot vomiting, now imagine if their would be a pregnant woman inside that aeroplane, sho could give birth to a mentally and physically damaged baby, or worse get a miscarriage due to the formentioned event. Imagine if you would sit on that plane and was on the toilet when the protagonist moves the plane, YIKE!
• In one Direct TV commercial, man with cable + scrambled cable divided by work ethic ---> An innocent man goes to JAIL! Flash forward and we see the defendant working out thinking of the lawyer that had failed to defend him before getting release; what is the first thing that man does the moment he gets out of prison? HE BLOWS UP THE LAWYER'S FRICKING HOUSE!
• This troper did not take too well to this Pokemon Blue And Red commercial, and the fact that they thought it was okay to show an advertisement of 151 different creatures being trapped on bus, then violently crushed into a single tiny rectanglur console, by some sadist bus driver, just to advertise a childrens game!
• In a recent aluminum foil advertisement, it shows sentient beings like humans, and animals made of aluminum foil. There is one wearing a chefs hat, and that to is aluminum foil. And they cook what seems to be sentient chicken nuggets, which is horrifying enough, in an oven, in aluminum foil. That all came from the same roll. That aluminum foil is probably, to them, flayed skin or muscle fibers or other giblets along that vein. They seem perfectly fine with it, is the worst part