The category of cooking videos on TikTok is broad, to say the least — videos under this umbrella can feature anything from clean-girl aesthetic WIEIADs to the infamous Nara Smith making cinnamon toast crunch from scratch; private chefs crafting three-course meals for families in the Hamptons to college-aged students sharing hacks for cooking in a crammed apartment or dorm kitchen.
As Halloween approaches, decorations are blanketing front lawns and storefronts, grocery shelves are filling with Halloween packs of gummies and chocolates and the cold weather is setting in for the peak of fall season. The real world has fully succumbed to the festivities of the season, and TikTok is not far behind.
In concert with the spooky holiday approaching, the latest iteration of cooking videos to sweep TikTok are creepy cooking videos — especially those made by TikTok user @medusaslittleangel. These clips are making a name for themselves by featuring foods that look like body parts and animals, and the cooks often use special-effects makeup and hectic editing to make the minute-long video feel more like a horror production.
She dawns creepy eye contacts and fake teeth in all of her videos, and she often stares into the camera in her videos with a wide smile and beady eyes while she juts a knife into her food preparations.
This trend of halloween-themed food videos is quickly spreading, populating eerie videos onto users’ TikTok feeds. TikTok user @paytonirish makes brownies, but viewers are in for a spooky treat. The video features choppy clips set to a tense horror score, and the caption simply reads, “run.”
TikTok user @tetianabur goes one step further by incorporating the spooky theme into the presentation of the food itself. In one video, he molds ground meat into rats and tosses them in to simmer with skull-shaped mushrooms.
Other users like @derpy_erpy2 are preparing baked goods — in this video, blueberry muffins — while infusing scary holiday themes by describing the muffins as “the bodies,” the sugar as “cyanide,” and other baking ingredients as “suspicious white patterns,” all while an increasingly tense sound plays as the muffins are coming together.
As a more subtle, yet no less terrifying, instance of the trend, TikTok user @butnotcabello prepares a pasta frola that comes out of the oven looking like a bloody and deeply unsettling face with small, spiky teeth gleaming at its base. Edible? Sure. But would I eat it? Definitely not.
As Halloween approaches, there’s no doubt the trend will escalate — whether you next open your FYP to a shrill screech accompanied by a bug-shaped brownie, or a cook dressed as a vampire to dramatically stab into a turkey, I can’t be sure.