First to jump on the spooky bandwagon, Paramount launched a terrifying guerrilla marketing campaign for their newest horror flick, Smile. The film sees the protagonist stalked by an entity pretending to be other people smiling at her throughout the film (but menacingly, not in a positive feedback kind of way). To give viewers the full immersive experience, actors were hired to stand in the background of sports games and smile maniacally at the camera, freaking the living daylights out of both horror fans and sports audiences alike.

Coming to you with a dose of real retro 80s-style Satanic Panic: Reebok’s new shoes are accused of being the work of Satan and a possible harbinger to the end of the world. According to the kind of people who don’t get invited to family gatherings anymore, these shoes are designed to mimic the hoofed feet of a demon and will bring about the apocalypse, rather than the more likely design inspo of traditional Japanese Tabi.

Freelance marketplace Upwork has turned to Halloween for inspiration in their new ads. To show the old way of working is dead, their new tv spots have featured a singing zombie, because this is a thriller, thriller night, and no one’s gonna save you from the beast that’s about to strike.

Speaking of seeing dead people, Bruce Willis has become the first actor to sell his likeness rights to deepfake technology, allowing a deep fake of himself to be superimposed over another individual. The ethics of this technology has been a topic of discussion in Hollywood recently (aka uncanny-valley Peter Cushing in the new Star Wars) but for an actor who has recently announced illness is forcing him to retire, this technology could be, as Willis puts it, “a great opportunity to go back in time.” (Or, to keep earning an income long after your physical body has passed Hollywood’s unforgiving use-by dates).

In 1981, speculative zoologist Dougal Dixon released After Man, a futuristic encyclopaedia showing horrifying illustrations of what creatures may exist 50 million years after human extinction. To mark forty years and no change in humanity’s compulsive desire to destroy itself, Breakdown Press has released an expanded anniversary edition, showcasing our future inhabitants in all their creepy, terrifying glory. I, for one, welcome our new overlords, Vampire Bat-Chicken and Squirrel-Snake (Squake).

There’s an unofficial rule in horror cinema that you can kill as many people as you want, but you can’t kill the dog. We all know products featuring a cute bunny logo equals cruelty-free, but it turns out if a company can’t make it through the vetting process, they’ll often put a “fake” cute bunny on their products anyway, to imply a level of animal kindness they may in fact be utterly lacking. Turns out, technically there’s nothing actually stopping anyone from putting cute bunny symbols on their products, PETA approved or not. Check out how to spot the bad bunnies here.

Lets play another game of spot the difference: After-Dark Edition! Because social media sites can have strict policies about advertising sex products, Blush, an adult entertainment store in Iceland, hid their toys throughout the interior photos of a real estate listing. Creating a series of photos that appear to be kitchen appliances or décor and upon closer inspection are… not those things.

Like putting on a sitcom after a horror movie, here’s a break from all the spooky news. When Sweden reopened after lockdown, the waitlist to get married at city hall became fully booked for months, so McDonalds offered a solution: drive-thru weddings. Over sixty couples were married in one day, driving up to an officiant and leaving with a special happy meal. Apparently they can give you a legally binding document, but not an Egg McMuffin after 10am.