A teen becomes a witch's horror story in Skittles' Halloween ad

Skittles' first Halloween ad in five years puts a modern-day spin on "Hansel and Gretel," with the tale of a witch who's lured a teenager to her lair with the promise of candy. However, she didn't bank on how annoying teens can be. As he sits boiling in her cauldron, the boy (played by actor Matty Cardarople from "Stranger Things") keeps asking for more Skittles as the despairing witch tells him again and again to just leave and go home. In a fun meta moment, he asks her to watch a Skittles commercial on his phone, in which an alternative witch boils a boy telling him "life is an un-ending cycle of disappointment." "It's not as good as I remember," he comments. The tagline this time is "annoy the rainbow." The spot is by DDB Chicago and directed by Smuggler's Bjorn Ruhmann. The clever, mundane details add to the humor—like the witch's dingy kitchen, with microwave oven and vitamin pills sittling alongside the ravens and broomsticks. The endless torture the teen inflicts on the witch reminds us of a Skittles classic that easily fits into the "annoy the rainbow" framework, in which a teenager trades his candy for an opera-singing bunny—but lives to regret it.

A teen becomes a witch's horror story in Skittles' Halloween ad

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