Fanta Ghost Face Punch asks the question: what’s your favorite berry movie?
The seasonal, limited time only Fanta Ghost Face Punch isn’t a surprising thing. The same brand already trotted out special edition beverages embossed with the visages of Michael Myers, Chucky and whatever the name of that dude from The Black Phone is called last year. A Scream tie-in soda was pretty much inevitable.p
I had so many puns lined up for this thing. None of them are 100 percent accurate though, and that’s a shame. If this was a zero-calorie beverage, for example, I could say something like “It’s hard being friends with Sidney, because when you’re friends with Sidney, you diet!” The fruit punch flavor also negates a couple of obvious jokes. Like, if this was a Pepsi partnership, you know we’d have snuck in a “Mountain Dewey” gag in here somewhere.
So I guess the best I can muster is something along the lines of “Fanta Ghost Face Punch will have you saying ‘Hello, SIP-ney!’”
Man, you don’t know how proud I was of myself when I thought that one up.
Admittedly, writing an entire article about this licensed soda novelty is a challenge. I mean, there’s only so much you can say about the packaging and the taste and how little it has to do with the Scream franchise. But it’s such an ephemeral thing that it would feel wrong to let it slip through the cracks this Halloween season. Like, 20 years from now, I highly doubt they’ll still be selling this particular beverage, but who knows. It already kinda feels like a bygone relic of the past in real time. It’s a drinkable time capsule of what it was like to be around during October 2026. And in that, it has some obvious value as something that can be preserved on a niche website forever.
We’ll start with the aesthetics. The packaging is pretty great. Black is the main color, but we’ve got a nice little splash of purple and blue in the mix, too. You have to love how the corporate logo uses and obvious bleeding font, albeit without any red in it so people won’t think it’s actually meant to be blood, even though it obviously is. The more you think about it, the weirder this thing becomes. It’s the G-rated version of an R-rated property, sort of becoming a stylized parody of itself in the translation from cinematic product to literal consumer product. Elementary schoolers can’t see any of the Scream movies, but they can drink this beverage which pays homage to the franchise. Which makes me really wonder what Wes Craven would think of all of this; maybe he’d just be mad nobody made any Last House on the Left Lunchables or something?
Another interesting thing about the product artwork is its depiction of Ghost Face. It’s the typical Edvard Munch straight ahead mug shot, without any knives in the equation. Which, again, makes sense considering who this product is being marketed to. It’s not like I expected to see a cartoon of Rose McGowan getting decapitated by a garage door on the label or anything like that, but I’m still kinda amused by how hard someone had to work to sanitize the character this much.
As for the drink itself? Well, it’s very, very purple. Which would suggest that it would be grape-flavored, except it’s “punch” flavored. Granted, the label doesn’t tell you what kind of punch its supposed to taste like, which is usually a giveaway that the soda itself isn’t going to taste like anything specifically, just a random jumble of artificial citrus flavorings. Which is the case with this beverage, with a little deviation from the script.
If the product was meant to taste like pineapples or mango, I wasn’t picking it up. It has a bit of a muted cherry flavor that kinda weaves in and out with strawberry, which makes me wonder if the beverage was originally meant to be dyed red until somebody at Coca-Cola said it looked too much like blood and they couldn’t do it. I still contend there’s a mild grape tincture in the mix, but it’s the kind of thing you only taste upfront and not in the back of your throat while you’re swallowing it. So calling it strawberry-cherry-grape flavored isn’t totally accurate, but it’s not wholly inaccurate, either.
I doubt anyone cares about the nutrition facts for Ghost Face Punch, but yeah, it has a lot of sugar in it. Like, 140 percent of your daily recommended amount of total sugar. The ingredients list is a bit abstract, and doesn’t really get you any closer to determining what the actual intended flavor of the drink is supposed to be. The label does explicitly mention that it’s devoid of any real juice, which makes the use of the word “punch” in its namesake all the more bamboozling. Like, I’ve had a lot of Hawaiian Punch in my day and this thing doesn’t even taste comparable to that. Or maybe my taste buds are off, we can’t rule anything out at this point.
It’s refreshing, though, whatever it’s supposed to be. It’s got a nice, clean, crisp taste that might be a bit too predictable for some people, but it’s not like we’re cracking open a vintage Merlot. The mere fact that a Scream branded soda is available in virtually every gas station in America at the moment is kind of a circuitous self-justification for the drink’s beverage. For anybody who has ever considered the Scream films “pop horror,” well, now it truly IS “pop horror.” For anyone who doubts that horror is legitimately mainstream, I think this product is all the counter-evidence needed. We can drink Scream at any Target in the continental U.S. — if that isn’t a sign that we’re winning the culture war, I don’t know what is.
