Happy happy Halloween! Silver Shamrock!
As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
- Silver Shamrock's robotic employees. Throughout the film, they gruesomely murder whoever threatens to expose Conal Cochran to the world...or simply hates the company. Teddy in particular gets a power drill to the brain for discovering that they're not human.
- They are absolutely silent — at many times of the movie, a character turns, and boom, there they are, with that piercing synthesizer chord blaring....
- The practice run on the Magic Pumpkin commercial. The spell in the seal triggers and messily rots away Little Buddy's head as he holds it in silent agony. As the kid falls dead, a huge swarm of snakes and insects is released from what was his mouth, which eventually kill Buddy and his wife.
- It gets even worse if you are one of those that read the novelization. The novel goes into graphic detail as to what is happening in that mask; for example, Little Buddy is unable to scream because his larynx had already rotted away. The things released from the masks are venomous insects and snakes; harmless crickets and garter snakes stand in for most of them in the movie. And rather than Ralph Strait's incredibly Narm performance as Buddy Kupfer, the novel version just stands there in mute shock in front of the door, staring at the decaying body of his son, until the snakes put him out of his misery. And when all is said and done? Cochran laughs, not an Evil Laugh but one of genuine mirth, like murdering a family with black magic was just another of his practical jokes.
- The sequence of all those kids throughout America on Halloween, buying and wearing Silver Shamrock masks as company vans drive through neighborhoods reminding them about "the big giveaway." Including Dan's own kids. All while the commercial jingle plays in the background. You just know most, if not all, of those kids are going to die that night. It's probably one of the most chilling sequences in the movie.
- The fact that at the end, Conal probably succeeded when you consider the Fridge Logic. The commercial was set to air around the U.S., and we have different time zones, meaning at least one timezone will have all its kids killed.
- The novelization of the film pulls no punches, the last paragraph of the entire book says that the plan worked."Then there was only the sound of the rain outside in the endless blackness of the long night and, presently, the rising tones of a pitiful wail within and without, spreading across the station, the town, and the land without end."Dan: STOP IT!
- Conal Cochran himself manages to be more horrifying than his own robots. The amused way he talks about murdering millions upon millions of children as the best kind of joke on them.
- His lecture on Halloween and what he feels it actually is is equally chilling. It makes you think that - beyond it being a great joke on the children, he's taking out his bitterness over what Halloween has become: a commercialized mess just like Christmas.
- The "misfire." Marge discovers the chip hidden inside a Silver Shamrock trademark on one of the masks and removes it, prompting a laser beam-like spell to fire out and strike her in the face, tearing her lips off and exposing part of her skull, her eyes turning a ruined blood red.
- She's also still alive and struggling to breathe as - foreshadowing the later test run - a large cricket emerges from her mouth. This is because she didn't get the full effects of the spell. It was more than enough to kill her, but had only begun the process of turning her head's interior into snakes and insects before the medallion was thrown out of range.
- Becomes Fridge Horror if you consider that plenty of other people have probably messed with a mask over the last few days, if they were sold all across the country.
- The death of Grimbridge at the hospital. The robot thug at first makes as if to pull an Eye Scream move on him, and Grimbridge shuts his eyes. Butt instead, the android pinches his nose bridge hard enough to crush it, then pulls it outward, causing his face to become convex. He basically ripped the man's skull apart from the outside.
