The best Halloween adverts ever made, ranked

Halloween has grown into one of the biggest retail moments of the autumn on both sides of the Atlantic, and yet the advertising it produces is mostly bunting. Brands buy a pumpkin, add a cobweb to the pack shot and call it a campaign. The handful of Halloween adverts worth remembering did something harder: they found the one thing their product had in common with the holiday and pushed it until it was uncomfortable.

This is Ad Ranking’s list of the best Halloween adverts ever made. The criteria are ours as usual: one idea a stranger could retell, craft that survives a second viewing, evidence the brand risked something, and published proof it worked. Every agency, year and credit below has been verified, and anything that could not be stood up has been left out rather than guessed at.

One warning before the list. Halloween attracts more false memories than any other season, and several campaigns widely described online as Halloween classics are nothing of the kind. Apple’s Frankie’s Holiday is a Christmas advert with a monster in it. Chipotle’s The Scarecrow is a September film about the food system. Neither belongs here, however often they are listed.

12 to 8: stunts, sight gags and one very good pop-up

12. Reese’s: The Robotic Trick-or-Treat Door (2020)

Halloween 2020 had a problem no amount of copywriting could solve: nobody was allowed to knock on a stranger’s door. Reese’s built one and drove it to them, mounting a working front door on a remote-controlled robot that trundled through American neighbourhoods dispensing cups from a distance. It is a piece of hardware rather than a film, and it answers the actual anxiety of that particular October instead of ignoring it. No agency credit could be verified, which is the only reason it is not higher. Crown verdict: the best pandemic-year brand response in any category, and the only one that made children happier.

11. Airbnb: A Night at Dracula’s Castle (2016)

Airbnb persuaded the custodians of Bran Castle in Transylvania to accept overnight guests for the first time in roughly seventy years, then offered two people the chance to sleep there in coffins on Halloween night. The competition ran in October 2016, the winners stayed, and every travel desk in the world covered it for free. It is the purest expression of what Airbnb was actually selling at the time, which was access to places hotels cannot offer. The agency behind it has never been reliably credited. Crown verdict: the single best-chosen location in the history of seasonal marketing.

10. Heinz: The Spookiest Store (2022)

To launch a black garlic mayonnaise, Africa and Wonderland opened a pop-up shop in the Boldu-Cretuleasca forest outside Bucharest, a folklore site where Dracula was rumoured to have been beheaded, trading from midnight on Halloween for one day only. The activation ran alongside work in the UK, the Nordics, the UAE, Mexico, Australia and half a dozen other markets. A black condiment is a weak product story and a forest at midnight is a very strong one, so the brand simply swapped which of the two it was selling. Crown verdict: proof that a limited edition only becomes interesting when the place it is sold from is.

9. Burger King: The Ghost of McDonald’s (2016)

For Halloween 2016 a Burger King in Queens draped itself head to foot in a white sheet with eyeholes cut out and a sign explaining that it had come as the ghost of McDonald’s. There is no film, no media budget and no production company, just a building in a costume and a photograph that travelled around the world in a day. It is the whole of Burger King’s competitive strategy compressed into one prop. The agency has never been confirmed, so we credit nobody. Crown verdict: the cheapest great idea on this list and the most confident piece of brand bullying in fast food.

8. Asda: Word Up (2017)

Saatchi and Saatchi London had a family possessed by the Halloween spirit lip-syncing Cameo’s Word Up around the house, directed by Jack Cole through Sonny, and then attached the first Shazam-to-augmented-reality mechanic used in a UK television ad: viewers who Shazamed the spot unlocked a lip-sync filter of their own. Supermarket Halloween advertising is usually a costume range in a trolley, and this is a music video with a range in it. Crown verdict: the moment UK supermarkets worked out that Halloween is a dressing-up occasion, not a grocery one.

7 to 4: the ones that understood the holiday

7. Burger King: The Call (2023)

Dentsu Creative launched the Ghost Pepper Whopper with a sixty-second horror short rather than a food ad, released on Friday the thirteenth of October and directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, who had previously worked on American Horror Story. It was shot in a single day on the California location used for Jeepers Creepers, using a car from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and ran in cinemas ahead of features as well as online. The product is a limited edition with a two-week life, and the film is built to be watched voluntarily. Crown verdict: genre film-making done properly, by a brand that understood nobody wants a burger commercial on Halloween.

6. IKEA: The Fearniture Collection (2021)

DDB Group Italy lit three ordinary IKEA products so that their shadows became something else: a stool throws a monster, a desk chair throws a ghost, a clothes rail throws a spider. It is a print campaign in a season dominated by film, it requires no copy to explain it, and it is entirely made of things the shop already sells. Photographed by Francesco Van Straten with post by B612 Studio, it is also the only entry here that would work as a poster in any language. Crown verdict: the best-crafted Halloween idea ever built out of stock, and the cheapest to produce.

5. Asda: The Big Freakend (2021)

Havas London sent a group of teenagers into an Asda where a colleague with a jack-o’-lantern for a head rises out of a pumpkin crate and turns their heads into lanterns too, after which they dance through misty aisles to Dead or Alive’s You Spin Me Round. Vicki Maguire’s team shot it through Biscuit Filmworks with Big Red Button directing, and landed the price message in the voiceover rather than a supered flash. Asda reported that Halloween searches across its sites rose 820 per cent year on year. Crown verdict: the best-looking supermarket Halloween ad anyone has made, and it still remembered to mention the prices.

4. M&M’s: Ghosted (2021)

Fifteen seconds, one joke, perfectly timed. Red and Yellow leave a Halloween party congratulating themselves on surviving another year without being eaten, and Yellow floats away mid-sentence with a bite taken out of his back. BBDO New York made it with Kirk Kelley directing through Hungry Man, and it was the brand’s first new Halloween commercial in eleven years. A confectionery brand whose characters are made of the product has exactly one Halloween story available to it, and this is the cleanest version anyone has written. Crown verdict: the tightest gag on the list, and proof that fifteen seconds is enough.

3 to 1: the best Halloween adverts ever made

3. Heinz: Tomato Blood (2021)

Wieden and Kennedy New York noticed that every home-made zombie costume in the western world already runs on Heinz, and simply put the brand’s name on it. Tomato Blood was a relabelled bottle sold inside a twenty dollar costume kit with a makeup palette, brushes, a dropper, fake teeth and rhinestones, backed by a dedicated site and a Halloween pop-up store in Los Angeles with drip stations.

It returned in 2022 with a vegetarian vampire recruitment drive fronted by the creator E.J. Marcus, arguing that humans are people too, at a friendlier price point and with national distribution. Marketing Dive covered the launch in detail. Crown verdict: the rare seasonal idea that is a product rather than an advert, and the only Halloween campaign that made a hundred-year-old label feel like a costume shop.

2. Tesco: Spookermarket (2015)

BBH London turned a Tesco store into a haunted house overnight and filmed real customers walking into it, with hidden cameras catching the moment each shopper works out that the scares are staged and aimed at them. David Stoddart directed through BBH’s in-house Black Sheep Studios, and the reaction footage is the ad.

The commercial discipline is what lifts it. Rather than stopping at the prank, the campaign ran four forty-second how-to films showing viewers how to build the same scares at home, each one made of things Tesco sells. BBH returned the following year with a spooky delivery van, which is the compliment a good format pays itself. Crown verdict: the best British Halloween campaign ever made, because it turned a stunt into a shopping list.

1. Burger King: Scary Clown Night (2017)

The rival brand’s mascot is a clown. Clowns, in the autumn of 2017, were the most frightening thing in popular culture. LOLA MullenLowe in Madrid put those two facts together and invited anyone who turned up at a Burger King dressed as a clown to eat a Whopper for nothing, under the line “come as a clown, eat like a king”.

Rodrigo Cortés, who made Buried, directed the film as a proper horror short, and the offer ran on the night of 31 October across dozens of markets, including a Leicester Square opening from seven in the evening until three in the morning for the first five hundred clowns through the door. It won a Graphite and a Wood Pencil at D&AD in 2018. Every element does two jobs at once: the costume is the discount, the queue is the media, and the joke is the positioning. Crown verdict: the only Halloween campaign that is also a competitive strategy, and the best seasonal idea any brand has had this century.

How we ranked these

Idea first, in the order we use for every campaign we score: could a stranger retell it in a sentence. Then craft, then bravery, then effectiveness on published evidence only. Halloween punishes the last of those, because almost nobody publishes seasonal results, so anything with a verified number carries it a long way. That is why Asda’s 820 per cent search figure and Burger King’s D&AD metal count for more here than they would in a Christmas list.

The second test is whether the holiday was necessary. A cobweb over an existing ad scores nothing. The entries at the top all had a reason to exist in October and could not have run in any other month, which is the opposite of how most seasonal work is briefed. Compare the discipline in our ranking of the best Christmas adverts, where the budgets are twenty times larger and the ideas are frequently smaller.

Two categories dominate for obvious reasons. Fast food owns Halloween because it is open at midnight and its rivals have mascots, which is why Burger King keeps appearing on lists like this one. Supermarkets own it because they sell the costumes. Everyone else is renting the holiday, and it shows.

Fanta is the one brand running a genuine multi-year Halloween platform, from the Philippine Scream Machine in 2018 through the Latin American Monster Mansion series to the Haunted Universe films of 2026, the newest of which was made with generative AI and named turkey of the week by Campaign in September 2026. Persistence is worth something. It is not yet worth a place in this top twelve.