And you thought Halloween was scary…

Is it just a coincidence that Halloween and America's national elections usually fall just a week apart? Politics is scary, definitely more frightening than ghosts, goblins and Frankenstein's monster. No wonder Presidential masks are so popular during Halloween: What's more horrifying than going to the polls to vote for the people who will determine the fate of the world? And if you're preferred candidate loses, uh oh, there goes the planet.

That's the message of some political advertisements put out by the Republican National Committee lately. In the highly controversial "These Are The Stakes," threats from Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri fill the screen, followed by images of nuclear blasts, as the sounds of a ticking time bomb beat on the soundtrack. Fortunately, like most Halloween stunts, the spots have served to entertain, and assuage fears rather than stir them up. (As one YouTube commenter notes, "Republicans have officially adopted Osama Bin Laden as their spokesman.")

If you want to see something really scary, check out artist James W. Johnson's excellent "Post Oil-Man," a disturbing digitally animated short about a bike-pedaling survivalist planning for post-oil Armageddon. As snapshots of world events and leaders flicker across the background, Johnson's rural old man gets in shape and readies for a bio-diesel and bags-of-rice future. "My hope is that even if people don't agree that there is an oil crisis," Johnson told Salon.com, "perhaps they would be willing to sit through a wacky three-minute monologue and at least consider the possibility."

The BBC's website is hosting a similarly frightening political statement from U.K. commercial director Simon Robson. In the provocative "What Barry Says," the filmmaker has turned statements from pub regular Barry into a highly graphic, Soviet-style propagandistic red-and-black animation about the U.S.'s "war on terror, or as others like to call it, the beginnings of the Third World War," says the narrator, who calls the new "war corporatism" "being lead by weapons manufacturers" the "dawn of a new fascism." Now that's scary.

If you want more traditional chills this Halloween, you can always check out AtomFilm's horror section. But I find politics a lot more spine-tingling.