Sometimes truth is scarier than fiction.
Sid Lee Toronto and Sid Lee Collective created a series of frightening Halloween masks for the World Wildlife Fund of Canada representing such real-world fears as overfishing, pesticides, factory farming and oil spills.
A promotional video introduces the concept with the line “Every year on Halloween, children dress up as our greatest fears. But in 2016 we have something new to be afraid of.”
Accompanied by creepy music and jump cuts, that sentiment is perhaps a tad misleading, as the environmental issues addressed by the campaign are hardly new. That “the longer we ignore them, the more dangerous they become” is a much fairer point. The video goes on to introduce each of the masks briefly, ending with a call for viewers to donate to the World Wildlife Fund of Canada at RealScary.ca.
Of course, some of the issues lend themselves to the concept better than others. The fears generated by the natural habitat destruction and monoculture-fostering of factory farming, for example, are difficult to depict in a visual medium and Sid Lee’s mask just looks like a cheeseburger mixed with a mass of multi-colored paint.
For the most part, though, the campaign does an admirable job of making masks that function as representations of the issues that also look like something a kid might wear while trick or treating around the neighborhood.
The pesticide mask tackles the issue of colony collapse disorder, of which pesticides are believed to be a contributing cause, with a head full of dead bees sure to frighten any melissophobe, while the agency manages to make overfishing and oil spills into scary visages as well. Each of the masks appears in a poster tackling its related issue, accompanied by the tagline “Not all monsters are imaginary.”
“The damage humans are doing to the planet is much scarier than any imaginary monster,” Sid Lee Toronto executive creative director Jeffrey Da Silva told Adweek. “Kids seem to know this better than adults, and Halloween night felt like the perfect time to spark a conversation about what they are truly scared of.”
