T he 13 Most Bizarre Halloween Stock Photos of 2014
The holiday season looms over the marketing world like a plague of locusts. An inevitable torrent of year-end special promotions and seasonal updates will consume the next three months as it does every year. In preparation, we nail plywood over the windows, hoard bottled water in the cellar and send our minions out into the internet to mine stock photos consistent with the impending calendar holiday.
HALLOWEEN!
This work is not for the weak willed. Littered among the thousands of perfectly acceptable photographs and illustrations are some of the most astonishingly awkward images. It’s dangerous work. Many a dutiful employee has been driven to distraction by the unexplainable compositions discovered in the unexplored depths of the stock photo dungeons.
Below we have collected the 13 most dangerous works. Perhaps with controlled exposure we can inoculate ourselves from their maddening effects. Go slow brave adventurer. Horrors await ye.
1) Nothing is more terrifying than the misuse of Photoshop.
2) Human tastes best with watermelon.
3) It’s 2014, Dad. This is how all the cool kids wear their chain mail.
4) Sexy, sexy, pumpkin man.
5) The sexy pumkin’s kid brother.
6) Can you spot the future serial killer in this photo?
7) The voodoo doll is almost as terrifying as the conflicting eye-lines.
8) One of Macbeth’s witches performing Hamlet’s “Alas, poor Yorik.”
9) This little witch still thinks her broom is for cleaning.
10) You know you’ve gone insane if you see this picture and the first thing that pops in your head is, “Can you kill a zombie by choking it?”
11) No wonder we have a problem with the undead. Death is terrible at her job.
12) Witches have cats or bats or snakes or spiders. Not snails. Leave that snail alone!
13) Yep. That’s Jerry O’Connell on shutterstock. AAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!
If you survived these, check out our picks from 2013. When you inevitably tap-out, we offer the opportunity to disinfect your eye balls with a little learning. Check out our 5 tips for choosing the right stock photo and you’ll never subject any of your readers to the same trauma we’ve just put you through.
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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