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Volvo Marks the End of 2016 with Creepy VR Commercial

Volvo's cars are doing quite well at the moment, and if we're honest, it's commercials aren't too shabby either - which makes it that more difficult to understand where this latest video celebrating the end of the year and the beginning of the new one came from.
Volvo New Year commercial 5 photos
Photo: YouTube screenshot
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For Volvo's sake, we hope it's just a poor attempt at creating something that uses the 360-degrees technology, focusing more on this gimmick than on the content itself. If the clip's purpose was to scare the bejeezus out of us, then mission accomplished, it did just that.

It features a group of four young people in the middle of the woods, all gathered around a fire smiling, seemingly oblivious to the darkness around them. Hands up everybody who has seen at least a dozen horror movies that begin just like this.

The first reaction is to analyze the characters. You know at least two of them, most likely three, won't still be alive by the end of the movie, so you try to figure out which is the lucky one. At any point, you expect something with claws to jump out of the bushes and start hacking and slashing, but that moment never comes.

Instead, Volvo finds another way to make the scene even creepier. At one point, one of the two males walks toward the two parked XC60 SUVs (really, guys? Four persons and two cars? How about some carpooling?) and switches on the sound system.

Lord Alfred Tennyson's "In Memoriam" poem can be heard coming through the speakers, and even though it essentially has a positive message, hearing stuff like "those we see no more" and "dying" in this scenery while an owl is howling is enough to make a grown man run to the car and lock himself in.

None of the protagonists does anything like that, though. Instead, they remain around the fire as the ominous chance of somebody lurking in the night is still present. Whatever possessed Volvo to create something so eerie is beyond us, but come to think of it, we kind of like it.

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About the author: Vlad Mitrache
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"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie)
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