Are we breeding a generation of cannibals?: A roundup of disturbing Halloween candy

Remember the good ol' days, when Halloween candy
consisted entirely of safely neutral geometric shapes, like circular lollipops
and rectangular candy bars? Those days are gone. Gradually over time, a sick
humor has taken over our candy stores, and an eerie candy-based level of
reality has set in. Nigh-shapeless, cute little gummi bears have given way to
fake-blood-filled gummi eyeballs. Last
year's feature look at cheap Halloween candy turned up such gruesome
"delights" as a life-size gummi rat and a line of surprisingly detailed plastic
insects filled with sugar-slime guts. This year, we shopped around (largely at
offbeattreats.com) and found even more gross-out goodies, leaning heavily
toward bloody severed body parts, body fluids, and unpleasant medical
conditions. Naturally, we rushed to buy and try them so you don't have to… and
so we can gauge whether any of them are tasty enough to justify the unsettling
Jeffrey Dahmer vibe of chowing down on the ugliest pieces of people.

Bag O' Blood

This tiny little plastic packet is made to
resemble an IV bag, and it's filled with gelatinous red goop that doesn't seem
to share any physical properties with blood. The gore is dialed back by what
the bag actually says: "Volunteer donor: Mr. Sugar Tooth" and "Expires: When
eaten."

Tastes like: Blood apparently has the flavor of
Watermelon Jolly Ranchers, and is incredibly difficult to actually consume.

Worth the gross-out factor? Maybe. It takes some
squeezing to get the "blood" out of the bag, and then it's so sweet as to be
almost sickening. The flavor and implied evilness should definitely appeal to
twisted little boys, though.

Candy Hose Nose

This bumpy plastic nose is
engineered to fit atop the wearer's real nose (affixed with a couple of
do-nothing, non-adjustable ribbons). From that ideal location, it's supposed to
drip its "candy slime" filling onto a waiting tongue.

Tastes like: Ambiguously
sweet—sour apple, maybe? (It's green, which in candy parlance these days
usually means sour apple.) It's tough to get past the slimy texture, which is
rendered even more disconcerting by the fact that if you're wearing this thing,
you can't see the spigot, and you can't be entirely sure when a blob of candy
snot is going to hit your tongue.

Worth the gross-out factor? The
packaging proclaims it to be the "Funniest Ever," and while it's probably
amusing for onlookers to watch you struggling to squeeze goo out of a
contraption tenuously clinging to your own face, it requires a certain amount
of coordination to not end up with sticky sugar-snot down the front of your
shirt. Perhaps best suited for young children, who tend to have a high
tolerance for generic sweetness, and are usually pretty sticky to begin with.

Zit Poppers

The box promises "oozy, sticky, goo filled zit
gummies" that are "plump & ripe!" The flavor is described as "AWFULeeeee
Zitlicious!" This may be every pre-teen boy's fantasy. The plastic bag inside
looks like soaking-wet gummi candy, but not much like zits.

Tastes like: Just your basic gummi candy, but with a
squishy liquid filling. That's supposed to be the pus!

Worth the gross-out factor? Well, the zits are
frustratingly difficult to actually pop. One finger on each side, pressing
toward the middle doesn't work, unlike with real zits! On top of that, you
can't touch one of these without coating your fingers in slime. Of course,
that's a problem with teenage boys, when you think about it.

Box Of Boogers

From the same company (and featuring the same ghoul)
as the Zit Poppers, the Box Of Boogers prompts slightly lower expectations:
It's easier to recreate a booger (in theory, anyway) than the less-nebulous
zit. Boogers can take all kinds of shapes and consistencies. That said, it
promises "gummy boogies that look & feel real!"

Tastes like: Real boogers probably don't taste any worse
than these sickly lumps. The candy boogers almost taste like unflavored gummi
candy, but they're extra-tough and tart—not sour, exactly, but definitely
not good.

Worth the gross-out factor? Kids can relate to
boogers more than zits, and younger kids are likely to think boogers are
fucking hilarious. That said, the taste is lousy. Then again, most kids would
willingly eat boxed mac-and-cheese for dinner every night, so what do those
little brats know?

Boo-Boo Licks Edible Candy Bandages

Gumi-Aid Fruit Flavored Gummies

These two different gummi representations of
Band-Aids go at the idea from very different angles. The Gumi-Aid snacks are
just regular-colored gummi candies that are sort of shaped like Band-Aids. The
Boo-Boo Licks are some next-level shit: They're the sickly tan color of real
Band-Aids, and the little blood-catching pad in the middle is red. And they're
individually wrapped!

Tastes like: The Gumi-Aid tastes like regular gummi, but
extraordinarily tough to chew—maybe because they're so thick. The Boo-Boo
Licks have a vaguely citrusy flavor that also comes across as slightly
medicinal. If that was intentional, it's genius.

Worth the gross-out factor? Definitely not. The
Boo-Boo Licks look too much like the real thing, and neither candy is particularly
tasty. They'd make a fun party favor, though—a tray of them on an
appetizer table would be nice.

Worry Warts

These vague green bumps with a creamy white
filling would never be mistaken for warts if not for the name and the crone on
the packaging. Lack of realism probably isn't entirely bad in this case.

Tastes like: Surprisingly not bad, kind of like
green-apple Junior Mints: They have that same creamy/waxy texture, and the
apple flavoring is very mild. The ingredients list includes skim milk, too, so
it's practically health food.

Worth the gross-out factor? They're really too
innocuous to be legitimately gross, so if you're looking for an apple-flavored,
off-brand Junior Mint, why not?

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Chocka Ca-Ca!

So we've had candy that's supposed to be boogers,
zits, Band-Aids, snot, and warts—why not just dive right into a pile of loose
shit, delivered in a diaper? This isn't aimed at trick-or-treaters, but rather
at new parents, who'd like nothing more than to think about baby shit!

Tastes like: The company behind this marketing home-run
can't even make chocolate palatable. To say it tastes like shit is an insult to
shit. The hard lump of candy was like flavorless Tootsie Rolls when cold, like
a scalding pile of choco-lava with impenetrable skin when barely microwaved (as
the directions suggest), and then like the dried, discarded, gluey skin off
some cheap hot chocolate once it cooled. This wasn't meant to be eaten, but
rather looked at, chuckled at, and thrown away.

Worth the gross-out factor? God no. Who wants to look
at a brown-filled diaper, then not even get the reward of a decent-tasting
chocolate? Here's the weird thing: It's made with corn syrup, sugar, chocolate
liquor, vegetable shortening, and natural and artificial flavors. Maybe we just
got an old one—the packaging does say "copyright 1993"—but
yuuuuuck.

Sour Flush Candy Plunger

This is basically Fun Dip with better packaging: A
plastic green toilet (with working lid!) filled with sour-apple powder dip and
two candy "plungers" that conveniently clip onto the side of the contraption,
so you can have your potty humor on the go.

Tastes like: A green-apple DumDum dipped in green-apple
Pixie Stix powder. The powder is a little tart, but not nearly sour enough to
induce the sort of wide-eyed, slobbering mania seen on the face of the creepy
cartoon that graces the toilet lid.

Worth the gross-out factor? If you can willingly
finish a package of Fun Dip, sure. It's basically sugar atop more sugar, but it
tastes familiar, and the toilet packaging is more cute than disgusting.

Brain Drain

This liquid candy is heralded as being extremely
sour, and is about 98 percent corn syrup. It comes in a handy squeezable
brain-shaped container with a cap so you can carry it around in your pocket and
whip it out whenever you need to impress some 6-year-olds.

Tastes like: Sour, but not extremely so. Like every
green-hued candy we tasted, it has that tangy-fruity flavor that translates to
"green apple," even though no comparable flavor exists in nature. It's
disgustingly slimy though, so even if it tasted like ambrosia, it would still
be a little gag-inducing.

Worth the gross-out factor? Liquid candy is really all
about the packaging, so the gross-out factor is the appeal here; if you didn't
want to be grossed out, you could just grab a green-apple Jolly Rancher and get
the same flavor. But only Brain Drain combines the hilarity of eating brains
with the sensation of swallowing apple-flavored mucus.

Toe Jam Cotton Candy

Toe Jam comes in a little
foil pouch emblazoned with a foot featuring ragged, greenish nails covered in
goopy fungus, but the contents of the pouch resemble neither toe jam nor cotton
candy. It's like venturing into a cheap carnival sideshow: Outside is a grotesque,
lurid picture of what you're supposedly about to see, and inside is a
disappointing failure. Or in this case, inside is a slightly fuzzy hunk of
hardened sugar, in a vivid, preternatural green color rarely seen outside a
Gatorade bottle. Maybe it was cotton candy before it was compressed into a
pellet. It's remarkably fragile; attempts to break off a piece resulted in a
shower of desk-covering fragments. Surely real toe jam isn't this splintery.

Tastes like: Sugar,
vaguely. Maybe it's supposed to be a little sour? It's like eating crunchy
nothing, with a side helping of dye.

Worth the gross-out
factor? On the one hand, there isn't much gross-out factor involved,
beyond the picture. On the other hand, there isn't anything about the candy
that rewards eating it, so it's pretty much a wash.

Gummy Flesh Fries

Gummy Body Parts Finger

Chili Fingers

Three different candies all
offer the same thing: a barely distinguished hunk of gummi that's supposed to
look like a bloody severed finger. The Gummy Flesh Fries, which come in a
little paper French-fry sleeve, are the worst: they're pallid and limp, the
color and texture of microwaved orange crayons, and they're sweating corn oil,
so they not only have a nasty greasy sheen, they tend to slide away from all
but the most determined grips, then stain everything they touch. They're
completely flat on one side, so apparently these are meant to be torture-victim
fingers that have been heavily ironed. The Gummy Body Parts Finger is much
smaller and paler, but also has been ironed on one side. For some reason, it
has a "bloody" fingernail, but a pristine stump. Chili Fingers look exactly
like downsized fingers, with admirable detail; they're meant to be dipped into
the bloody fruit "chili" that comes with them, which looks and smells exactly
like well-chewed Fruit Roll-Ups.

Tastes like: The Gummy
Flesh Fries have the consistency of old rubber, and a very vague berry taste.
Biting into them is hard; chewing them is harder. But at least then you aren't
looking at them. The Gummy Body Parts Finger is a little chewier, and tastes
strongly of artificial banana. Multiple people tried to bite off even a small
chunk of one of the Chili Fingers, and were unable to; it's like eating
plastic. Smokers who are trying to kick the habit and want something in their
mouths at all times might get some use out of Chili Fingers; they're the gummi
equivalent of an all-day sucker.

Worth the gross-out
factor? It's all but impossible to actually eat these things, so no, not
unless you like a tinge of fruit with your indigestible chemicals.

Crunchy Tarantula

This looks more like Crunchy
Tarantula That Someone Pulled All The Legs Off And Left To Die In A Heap Of Its
Own Limb Fragments, but we understand why they didn't want to put all that on
our shipping manifest. It appears to be a hard candy shell in the vague shape
of a spider, painted onto a square bed of brownish gummi.

Tastes like: Spun sugar
and artificial fruit flavoring, with a hint of flowery honey in the gummi
segment.

Worth the gross-out
factor? Yes, actually. The gummi could stand to be fresher—it's
stiff and gluey rather than firm and chewy—but the two-stage texture
experience is pleasant, and it's an interesting mix of sharply sweet and gently
fruity. It isn't going to replace peanut-butter M&Ms; in our hearts anytime
soon, but it's about as tasty as cheap candy is likely to get.

Spider Sacs

This detailed little plastic
spider apparently isn't having all that much luck in the egg-laying department:
Its egg-sac appears to be full of blood, with just a few forlorn, blobby
white-chocolate eggs floating around inside. If spiders had abortions, this is
the image that would be on the pro-life spiders' tiny little protest signs and
posters.

Tastes like: The red goo
is "sour strawberry flavor," and tastes a little tart and a whole lot sweet,
like distilled essence du Starburst rouge. In the grand tradition of
white chocolate down through the ages, the eggs taste like nothing whatsoever.

Worth the gross-out
factor? The strawberry syrup is reasonably tasty, and the gross-out
factor is only really an issue for arachnophobes. The real gross-out is in the
question of exactly how to eat this stuff, since there's no convenient opening;
no matter how you cut into the egg-sac, you're going to end up with sticky
scissors or gooey fingers. Starbursts are less creepy and considerably more
convenient. Which goes for most of the candies on this list, in
fact—there are tastier and less-traumatizing versions of everything on
this list. If The A.V. Club is going to barf at Halloween, we'd
rather it be from eating too much good candy than from looking at this stuff.