“Halloween gives brands permission to be strange, to be irreverent, to even be a little offensive.” Tim Nudd, Creativity Editor, Ad Age Christmas ads want you to cry. Halloween ads want you to laugh nervously, which is a far more useful emotion if you’re trying to be remembered. Americans alone are expected to spend $13.5 billion on Halloween this year, and half of them start shopping before October. So brands have stopped treating it as a costume party and started treating it as a season. Here are the ten that made me laugh, wince or both, plus two old favourites from the crypt. 1. Pringles: Once You Drop Fred Baur, the man who designed the Pringles can, asked to be buried in one. When he died in 2008, his family put some of his ashes in a Pringles tube and did exactly that. This year Pringles turned his last wish into a competition: sign a “Last Will and Taste-Ament” and you could win a can-shaped urn, plus a lifetime supply of crisps. Pringles won’t actually ship 200 years of them, so the winner gets $28,080 instead. The Dieline has the details. 2. Rivian: Ghostbusters Bill Murray is back as Peter Venkman, called to a suburban house where Slimer is eating his way through the fridge. The ad is good, but the real treat is that Rivian made the car part of the joke. A software update turns every Rivian into a Ghostbusters vehicle, with proton-pack light shows, Ecto-1 lock sounds and a parked-only game where you pop tiny marshmallow men. Ad Age named it Halloween campaign of the year. 3. Hay Day: Haunted Farms Hay Day is possibly the most relaxing video game ever made, so naturally it hired Yvette Fielding of Most Haunted to hold a séance on a farm in Oxfordshire. The question under investigation: would a ghost like to play a farming game? The result looks like found-footage horror, and the joke is that everyone is taking it completely seriously. 4. Cheetos and Blumhouse: The Flavor of Fear Cheetos teamed up with the studio behind Get Out and Paranormal Activity to launch Sweet Phantom Heat Puffs, which fizz, tingle and then numb your mouth. Blumhouse’s directors made proper horror shorts to go with them. In Man at the Bottom of the Bag, a shopper ignores a warning and unleashes Cheetle, a demon made entirely of orange dust. Anyone who has finished a bag of Cheetos and looked at their fingers will understand. 5. Twix: Zombie Claus Twix sells two bars in a pack, so it decided we deserve two holidays at once: Hallowmas. Zombie Claus turns up at a teenager’s door shouting “Happy Hallowmas”, and she has no idea whether to be merry or terrified. He also went on a New York street-debate show to argue that first impressions don’t matter, but second impressions do. Which is about as on-brand as a zombie can be. 6. Liquid Death: Blood Zero Liquid Death launched a raspberry cream energy drink with zero sugar and, crucially for its target market, zero blood. The ad stars a vampire who no longer needs human blood, sold with the line “Easy-drinking energy for people-drinking vampires.” Possibly the only drink in history to advertise what’s missing from it. 7. McDonald’s UK: Spooky Sauces McDonald’s UK and Leo turned six dipping sauces into Halloween face paint. The shades include Tomb-Mato Ketchup, Boo-Boo-Q and Garlic MayOoOo, and each kit comes with fry-shaped brushes and a sponge shaped like a Chicken McNugget. Only 100 kits exist, given away on Instagram, which means 99 people are going to be very smug at their Halloween party. 8. Garage Beer: Terrors of the Tailgate Garage Beer, co-owned by the American footballer Jason Kelce, made a horror film about the monsters you meet in stadium car parks. They also released trading cards of them, including The Table Smasher, The Cooler Raider and The Parking Lot Prophet. The $5 packs sold out, proving that people will pay good money to collect the very people they avoid. 9. Angry Orchard: Mystery Caller Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character was killed off in Scream 2, so you’d think she would have learned to stop answering the phone. In Angry Orchard’s ad she plays herself, and Ghostface rings anyway. The Scream cider pack comes in glow-in-the-dark cans with a new flavour called Mystery Caller, and Angry Orchard won’t say what it tastes like, which is either very clever marketing or the most frightening thing on this list. 10. Tesla: Halloween Mode Love Elon Musk or loathe him, Tesla is very good at turning a software update into a stunt. Park a Tesla in Halloween Mode and it plays spooky sounds and flickers its lights at anyone who walks up, the lock growls, the indicators hoot like owls, and you can talk through the car in a ghoulish voice from your phone. On the driving screen your car becomes a floating ghost, pedestrians shuffle like zombies and skeletons ride past on bicycles. The ad is simply the product doing something other cars can’t, which is the whole sales pitch. From the crypt GEICO, Horror Movie (2014). A group of teenagers in a slasher film are being chased. One suggests getting into the running car. The others decide hiding behind the chainsaws is the better plan. The voiceover’s verdict: in a horror movie, you make poor decisions, because it’s what you do. Twelve years on, it’s still the ad every Halloween parody is trying to be. Burger King, Scary Clown Night (2017). The year the film It came out, Burger King offered a free Whopper to the first 500 people who turned up dressed as a clown. The line was “Come as a clown, eat like a king”, and nobody needed telling which clown they had in mind.