Written by Jonathan Wojcik

Disturbing Halloween Fruit Snacks

   I've never really had any appetite for gummis or fruit-flavored candy, but I'm increasingly tempted to actually buy some "Florida's Natural Halloween Fruit Snacks" for the box art alone; creepier and creepier the more you take in. Enough to squeeze its own short article out of? Sure, let's go for it.





   You'll notice the box is dominated mostly by an apple and an orange, universally recognized as two of the most fundamental of all fruits. Naturally, these two are the most innocuous of the mascots, the apple just carved into a fairly ordinary, cute Jack O' Lantern face. Nothing out of the ordinary, here.





   Now, the orange gets just a little bit stranger than the apple, since its eyes could have easily been a couple of carved holes, but instead, they're hunks of skin. I just don't know what to make of that. We have long established through pumpkins that the eyes of fruit monsters should be holes. Is this the fruit monster equivalent of some blind, subterranean mutant with flesh grown over its eye sockets?

As a leading professional in that particular field of study, I can rightfully say yes, yes it is.





   I don't know what it is about the cherries that feels so unsettling, but they just are. Maybe it's the uncanny quality of the lips, or maybe it's the fact that now the eyes are just light reflection. That's even weirder than hunks of skin. It's obviously light from an outside source, since it's reflecting off of all the other fruit fiends as well. Why does it only serve as eyes for the cherries, and that blueberry bat? How does a sapient cherry WINK light reflection? This is wrong in so many ways. This is some deep, dark magic at work here.





   For the banana, they just decided to say "fuck it, we don't need eyes at all" and left the blind monstrosity with only a dopey smile, unless its eyes are on the opposite sides of its peel. Is what we're seeing here equivalent to it showing off its skull, or its brain? Are fruit monsters more tantamount to vertebrate or invertebrate animal life?





   Next, we have a strawbe-GOOD LORD. GOOD LORD. What glorious bastard designed these? They didn't even pretend to be aiming for cutesy, here. This is distilled, unadulterated fruit based horror. This strawberry has seen some shit. This strawberry has been places that cannot be described. And then it came back, and its eyes burned clean out of their sockets, but it never stopped seeing. It never stopped seeing, and it never stopped laughing. It's still out there, somewhere. Seeing. Laughing.





   You probably thought it couldn't get any worse, or even as bad as the strawberry, and that would be only because you didn't think hard enough about the god damned pineapple. In a crowd of fruit with faces, we can assume the pineapple is supposed to have one in the same relative place, but it's just. Fucking. Gone.

Like the strawberry, that has not hindered its ability to see. In fact, it sees better than any of them. It sees you.

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