Most ads try to grab attention. Horror makes people feel it. That is why the genre is so useful for brands. It gives advertising something many campaigns lack: tension, jeopardy, atmosphere and the sense that something actually matters. A product benefit becomes the way out. A social problem becomes impossible to ignore. A dull category truth suddenly has a pulse. The point is not to make everything scary for the sake of it. It is to use horror’s genre codes properly: dread, suspense, obsession, threat, revelation and release. Here are five tactics from the Emotion Engine that put the problem somewhere in the spooky basement.
- Turn the everyday problem into a nightmare
- Make the product the object of fear, obsession or seduction
- Use genre as a diagnostic device
- Use horror to expose a social truth
- Make the product the hero of a high-stakes mission
1. Turn the Everyday Problem into a Nightmare
Take a frustration people normally dismiss as minor — and exaggerate it into full cinematic horror. The benefit becomes the only way out.
The Clogging — Scott / Kimberly-Clark, VaynerMedia, 2023
Scott needed to make its anti-clogging toilet paper benefit feel noticeable in a category where every claim sounds identical. VaynerMedia's answer: treat clogging the toilet at your in-laws' as the setup for a full-blown horror film. Classic genre conventions — ominous pacing, rising dread, escalating panic, full cinematic sound design — applied to one of the most painfully relatable household disasters imaginable. The exaggeration inflated the emotional stakes of a small product truth into something people actually watched and shared.
HP Wolf (Wieden+Kennedy, 2021) turned endpoint cybersecurity into a noir thriller starring Christian Slater as a hacker who exploits weak office security — dramatising every product benefit with tension and stakes. A dry B2B message became a watchable series. Don't Risk It (Propel Manila, 2021) used miniature horror trailers to frame the nightmare of buying counterfeit electronics — glitching headphones, no tech support, orders that never arrive..
2. Make the Product the Object of Fear, Obsession or Seduction
Give the product the emotional intensity of something from a chilly thriller, and the desire for it becomes unavoidable.
Join the Flip Side — Samsung Galaxy, Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, 2023
Samsung needed to make switching to the Galaxy Z Flip feel culturally compelling rather than a rational tech decision. Wieden+Kennedy's answer: turn product desire into a horror-movie curse. The film follows a group of friends at summer camp who hear rumours about the phone's strange powers — one by one they fall under its influence until resistance becomes impossible. The horror conventions — whispered warnings, group jeopardy, characters being picked off — dramatised the product's allure more vividly than any spec sheet could. Switching felt less like a choice and more like an inevitability.
Ford's Scary Fast (Wieden+Kennedy, 2022) launched the F-150 Raptor R using classic horror-movie cues — darkness, lurking creatures, ominous suspense — to frame the truck as a machine of overwhelming power.
3. Use Genre as a Diagnostic Device
Disguise the message as entertainment — and let the audience feel the problem in their own body before they realise what's happened.
Subtitles — Visionworks, Leo Burnett, 2023
Getting people to confront the possibility they might need an eye test is a behaviour-change problem that direct messaging reliably fails to solve. Leo Burnett's answer: disguise the message as a movie trailer with subtitles. The ad uses trailer-style pacing and cinematic cues — but the real mechanic is the subtitles themselves. If viewers struggle to read them, the point lands without mentioning eyesight. The format created the diagnosis. The audience arrived at the conclusion themselves.
Queensland Health's You Do The 5. You Survive (CHEP Network, 2023) turned sun protection into a horror survival plot — positioning the five recommended protective actions as the steps that help you survive an attack by the real villain: the sun. Routine public health advice became an urgent personal survival strategy.
