The last couple of years there have been commercials with some rather fantastic looking zombies in them. The latest one was the Sprint zombie, which has kind of disappeared now that Halloween is upon us. Before that there was the long running Starburst zombie. Time Warner Cable also had one and there may be others out there.
These commercials air on programs kids definitely would be watching. Starburst is candy, so the commercial is even directed at them.
These are high quality zombies that could only be produced after four decades and millions of dollars of experimentation designed to scare the bejesus out of movie goers.
Anyone know of kids being freaked out by these super gory zombies?
I remember being scared by a commercial with a puppet when I was a kid. And it wasn’t even a ventriloquist type wooden dummy, it was more the Shari Lewis kind, except creepier for some reason.
I roll my eyes most of the time when people talk about how a movie, show, commercial, or whatever, is going to scare children (Roger Ebert did this a lot), and this isn’t an exception.
There are some kids who’ll be scared by anything (when I was younger my sister had friends over, a pair of sisters, who were too afraid to watch Home Alone of all things, and we tuned in during the part where the robbers were falling into the goofy traps), but oh fucking well, really.
Frighten children? Aren’t kids the ones who are driving the oversaturation of zombies in pop culture nowadays?
That being said, I am certain some children are frightened by zombies in commercials. Also by giant bugs in commercials, cereals that eat each other, rodents driving cars, Dennis Halbert’s voice coming from other people, the occasional Skittles ad, and any number of seemingly innocuous things.