Ikea S'pore's ingenious Halloween ad will creep you out

Thought Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror film The Shining was scary? Well, Ikea Singapore thought so too, going by its latest spoof advertisement to promote late-night shopping.

In a nod to the creepy haunted hotel tale starring Jack Nicholson, the Swedish home furnishing company uploaded a 11/2- minute clip on YouTube on Monday that is eerily reminiscent of a key scene in the film.

Ikea's clip has since taken the Internet by storm, raking in more than two million views and more than 7,600 likes as of 9.30pm yesterday.

The video, entitled Ikea Halloween, features a young boy riding a squeaky red tricycle around a dark Ikea showroom, seemingly devoid of people.

Spine-tingling music cues, lamps flicker and strange murmurs abound. At one point, the words "Redrug" appear, a dig at "Redrum" which figures heavily in the film.

Things come to a head when two people dressed in baby blue dresses and holding hands, block the boy's path.

"Hello Danny, come pay with us. Come and pay with us, Danny. Come pay with us," they intone ominously.

The scene is a play on The Shining, in which the character Danny Torrence rides his tricycle one night along the deserted corridors of a hotel and encounters the ghosts of twin sisters who tell him: "Come and play with us, Danny."

The New Paper compared the two scenes by linking clips on its website yesterday.

Time magazine said the ad was a "spot-on parody" of The Shining and that the video clip's creators "paid very close attention to detail".

Besides the word Redrug, Entertainment Weekly noted that the ad sported other "clever references", such as a parody of a scene in which Nicholson uncovers a corpse behind a shower curtain.

Some of these are also part of Ikea's "Spot and Win" contest, in which shoppers are invited to find 13 Ikea products - including a red rug - in the ad.

Said one impressed netizen, Dustin Sallings: "This was pretty awesome. The kid nailed it."

Ikea's new ad comes hot on the heels of its Apple parody ad for its 328-page 2015 catalogue for Singapore and Malaysia last month.

In that ad, a "design guru" - dressed like Apple designer Jonathan Ive - describes the catalogue in an almost iPhone-like manner, gushing over how it is "so simple and intuitive, using it feels almost familiar".

He also notes that every page is in "high-definition" and "loads" with no lag.

That ad has garnered more than 12 million views so far.

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