What Is Creepy Cooking? Inside TikTok’s Haunting Trend

Growing up, Halloween-themed food meant caramel apples, treats covered in orange and black sprinkles, or perhaps a batch of witch finger cookies with jam and almonds at the tips. If you really wanted to take your Halloween party to the next level, you might even fill a plastic cauldron with punch and dry ice, creating fog that crawls out over the edges.

Bites like these felt seasonal and on-theme but not frightening. Even as I got older and attended Halloween parties in my twenties, I seldom saw a snack or drink that generated seriously spooky vibes. That responsibility seemed largely relegated to horror movies.

As a place where trends and ideas can reach new people and become widespread in record time, social media is, naturally, where the possibilities for Halloween-themed food have started to expand, and they’re headed to an eerie place.

Welcome to creepy cooking TikTok — the new trend crawling across the social media platform, blending cooking videos with unsettling and sinister themes. (Be warned, creepy cooking videos aren’t for the faint of heart. Proceed with caution through this article and your TikTok feed if you find horror movies to be unbearable.)

To transform Halloween-focused food from something cute and seasonal into the kind of stuff that fuels nightmares, social media creators have adopted two strategies. The less disturbing route is to create dishes and drinks that look more like body parts, animals, or other creepy elements than the witch fingers of my youth ever did.

Some of the most creative examples I’ve seen include a bubbling pot of soup with meatball mice (complete with pomegranate arils for eyes) and floating mushroom skulls, or a platter full of miniature cherry pies that appear to have sinister faces in the top layer of crust, bleeding from their mouths and eyes.

However, it’s the other form of creepy cooking you’ll come across on TikTok that’s more likely to linger in your mind and prompt the need for a nightlight. With special effects makeup, fast-paced video editing, and chaotic body movements, some users have produced videos that show them cooking but also look like scenes straight out of a horror movie.

There’s one content creator who is largely responsible for these short-form videos, and her handle is the first hint that she loves anything scary. Naomi Rose, known on TikTok as @medusaslittleangelhas created an eerie online persona.

Rose created a character named Helga, a creature with jagged, yellowing teeth and entirely white eyeballs that seem to bulge out of her head. She often appears in creepy cooking videos on the creator’s account. With abrupt, unnatural movements like popping up from a corner of the screen, flashing an unsettling grin, or gnashing her sharp teeth — Helga convincingly mimics something akin to a haunted doll.

The backgrounds in Helga’s cooking clips are dark, and the creepy chef is often hunched over as she works in the kitchen, giving her motions an animalistic appearance. One thing is certain: The cooking videos that Rose is creating are far from appetizing, even when Helga makes a crispy chicken Caesar salad sandwich or a chicken bacon pot pie on camera.

The point of Rose’s videos isn’t to entice you to cook her recipes. Instead, Helga has connected with an audience that loves her strange combination of horror and home cooking simply for the aesthetic it evokes.

Comments like “What is this genre, and can we do more of it?” or “I actually love this subgenre of cooking content” reflect the sentiments of the almost two million followers who can’t tear themselves away from Rose’s content. And if you happen to be someone who loves all things scary and enjoys scrolling through food videos, perhaps you’ve found the perfect corner of the internet for yourself.