Creepiest Fast Food Commercials Of All Time

Fast food commercials are notorious for using bizarre tactics to build their brand awareness and sell everything from burgers and tacos to limited-edition dipping sauces to the masses. Nowadays, we tend to think of mouthwatering close-up glamour shots as the best way to get an audience excited about food, but many brands actually seem to take the commercial as their opportunity to do incredibly strange things in the name of selling food you can eat out of a paper bag in your car.

This creative license can sometimes lead to commercials that go beyond the realm of the bizarre and turn into anywhere from 30 to 90 seconds of downright creepy content. We took a deep dive into YouTube's fast food commercial archives and dug up some of the absolute creepiest fast food commercials of all time. The videos below span the full spectrum from uncomfortable to terrifying to "why would any advertiser ever think this is a good idea?" 

Jack in the Box, like Burger King, makes some extremely creepy fast food commercials. That's due in large part to the fact that many of the brand's television spots star an uncanny horror show of a character, a giant Jack in the Box bobblehead superimposed over an otherwise normal human body that walks and talks and does things otherwise normal humans do. 

In this commercial advertising the chain's Sourdough Philly Cheesesteak Melts, Jack brings some cheesesteaks to his "Philly cousins," a bizarre family comprised of two more Jack-type humanoids rocking mullets and sports jerseys, with a animal print-clad fully human mom, also with a mullet. The Philly cousins get kind of rowdy, but ultimately, they're impressed with Jack's sourdough skills. At the end, the elder Philly cousin holds up a cheesesteak sandwich and shakes it. The whole thing is a strange way to make a cheesesteak melt seem like it makes sense on the Jack in the Box menu.

Burger King is really good at making weird, creepy commercials, which is why its television spots occupy four of the places on our list of the creepiest fast food commercials of all time. This may not be the creepiest of the creepy commercials out there — but it certainly is the most sexist!

The concept of the "Herb the Nerd" campaign is pretty straightforward: Herb is a nerdy, rich guy who wants to gain the attention of the hot women who hang out at Burger King. But since he is so nerdy, the only way they'll give him the time of day is if he promises to maybe make one of them rich too.

We can only assume that the creatives behind this campaign were trying to find a way to make women want to spend more time at their local Burger King location in the hopes that they'll be blessed with Herb's presence, at which point they can all fawn over him and hope they get lucky. This is not a commercial that could be made in 2020. 

This Wendy's commercial, which promotes the company's use of high-quality beef, falls squarely in the realm of things that make viewers extremely uncomfortable. The opening shot is of a giant hand taking a little bit of beef from a giant burger. Then the "give a little nibble" jingle plays throughout the entire 30-second spot, while all manner of people — including a guy wearing a full suit and using his umbrella as a parachute — float in and out of some kind of all-white, anti-gravity environment, pulling tiny chunks of beef off of a giant Wendy's cheeseburger.

It's weird, and there's not a lot of logic to the whole shtick. The narrator tells us that we should be taking little nibbles of all kinds of hamburgers so that we can eventually realize the superiority of Wendy's and come to love it all the more. No, thanks. If we wanted the highest-quality beef, we probably wouldn't head to a fast food joint anyway. Instead, it just makes us not want to see another burger for a while. 

If you frequented the strange, dark corners of the early internet, then you're probably already familiar with Spongemonkeys, the clumsily-animated creations of Joel Veitch, who runs the website Rather Good. The Spongemonkeys originally gained a cult following after appearing in a song called "We Like the Moon," where they talk about, yes, their love for the moon. One of the Spongemonkeys sits upon the moon itself, wearing a jaunty bowler hat, while the other strums an acoustic guitar in a pirate hat.

The Quizno's fast food commercial is an obvious spin-off called "We Love the Subs" set to the tune of "We Like The Moon." People were so creeped out by the commercial when it first came out that Slate's Seth Stevenson actually had to write an entire explanation on the commercial, saying, "Never have I gotten so much mail on a single ad. I gather that you seek an explanation. And with great urgency. Many of you sound disturbed—as though your lives will be placed on hold until you've come to terms with these haunting creatures." Indeed. 

If you really want to absolutely melt your brain, watch this ten-minute-long compilation of every fast food commercial episode of The Pizza Head Show, which follows Pizza Head, a piece of Pizza Hut pizza, on a series of terrifying misadventures. In every episode, the innocent, unassuming Pizza Head is put into scenarios in which Steve, an anthropomorphic pizza cutter, tries with varying levels of success to maim him. A spirited narrator is always trying to convince Pizza Head, who eventually begins to catch on, that he is actually totally safe in these scenarios. When Pizza Head says that "Chef Steve" isn't really a chef or "Umpire Steve" isn't really an umpire, our friend the narrator responds with a sinister, "Sure he is!" 

All of the Pizza Head Show's episodes are unsettling, but the absolute creepiest is this episode, where Pizza Head is getting a check-up from the "world-famous Doctor Steve," who wants to perform some routine tests. Everything about this is terrifying, from the squishing sound of the pile of "donor pepperonis" to the gallery of pizza cutter medical students watching the pepperoni transplant procedure take place. 

Burger King makes some of the creepiest fast food commercials around, and this creepy clowns commercial advertising a Halloween promotion that offered a free Whopper to anyone who came into the restaurant dressed up like a clown is downright terrifying. Don't watch this commercial before bed if you don't want to have scary clown nightmares because it truly is that unsettling.

As is the case with many modern Burger King commercials, our journey begins with an unsuspecting Normal Guy who is just trying to leave his house when he finds a creepy honking bike horn on his front step. He looks around but gets on his bike and rides off into the dark. About 28 seconds in, we encounter our first scary clown, a Ronald McDonald lookalike riding on a tiny, squeaky tricycle. Our hero rides fast in the opposite direction, but naturally, terrifying clowns keep appearing out of nowhere. Still, he rides off toward the beacon of the Burger King sign, where he'll be safe, maybe? Of course not! The Burger King is filled with more scary clowns demanding their free Whoppers.

This is a creepy commercial that cannot be unseen. It's an effective marketing ploy for some adults, but it's also the kind of thing that will ensure small children don't sleep for weeks and develop a lifelong fear of both clowns and, perhaps, Burger King.