I just recently learned that my apartment is haunted. The building is less than two decades old, but still, when I put head to pillow at night—just when I’m about to slip into the last iota of unconsciousness my brain needs to fully fall asleep—I am often confronted with a familiar vocal fry purring in my ear: “I just heard something amazing!”
I’ve been through this routine before, and I know how to handle it. I respond, “Was it that, for the first time, one medication was approved to treat and prevent migraines?” This is the only way to quell this particular specter, who comes to me every moment that I am about to have even a second of meditative peace. Like with Rumplestiltskin, I have to name this dastardly villain to keep my family and me free from harm. Her name? Khloé Kardashian.
For nearly two years, I have been followed by the version of Khloé that lives trapped inside the Nurtec ODT Migraine Pill ads. She comes to me whenever I hear a new song that I like or get a piece of good news. My sister is going to have a baby? “I just heard something amazing!” There’s a new Charli XCX song? “I just heard something amazing!” New photos of Lee Pace with a nipple-framing pocket just dropped? “I just heard something amazing!”
It ricochets around my brain like shrapnel, sinking itself into every cortex, until it has become so permeative that I, too, am going to get a migraine!
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
These ads are my favorite thing. Like, maybe ever. There’s one for everybody! Pick your pleasure (or maybe your poison): There’s Khloé eating popcorn; Khloé standing against what appears to be the exterior of a Target; Khloé wishing you a migraine-free New Year in a snazzy suit before blowing on one of those Party City horns—with the horn sound added in post, naturally.
There’s even an ad where Khloé delivers a heart-wrenching, impassioned, moving message that I would compare to how we all felt after the false report that the Mars Rover’s final message to Earth was, “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.”
“For anyone that suffers with migraine, there is hope,” Khloé says. “Nurtec ODT worked for me and not everything works for everybody. You know, you’re not fighting this battle alone. I am fighting it with you. And…I’m…just praying for you guys!”
It’s sweet! And hey, Khloé really does suffer from intense and debilitating migraine pain. But the way the dialogue is spliced together is so choppy that the message is lost. It might even sound a bit like a threat.
Make no mistake—there is an inherent darkness to these ads. This version of Khloé Kardashian is particularly dead-eyed. It’s as if the people at Nurtec are holding her medicine hostage, forcing her to work through an intense migraine while reading cue cards just out of frame. Her eyes never meet ours directly, always landing somewhere between the bridge of my nose and my forehead. And if you leave one of these ads open on your phone or laptop? Those eyes just might follow you around.
The evils that have been trapped in these ads for the safety of mankind have been threatening to unleash themselves. In July, a brand new Nurtec ad with Khloé dropped. That day was a cause for celebration for all of us Khurtec-Heads. We pored over the new video—and that night, we smeared lamb’s blood on our doors to keep the spirit of Khloé from taking our firstborn sons.
Khloé, wearing the first blonde wig of her Nurtec oeuvre thus far and lashes so long that you can see them stretching out past that wig, tells us, “There’s nothing glamorous about migraines.” Got that right, sister. This new ad also has the most sublime “people in a medication ad” B-roll footage of any of Khloé’s outings with Nurtec yet. Khloé squints her eyes and nods thoughtfully in a business meeting, scribbles down some clothing designs, and holds up a pair of her Good American brand jeans, talking to someone else in the room who surely wasn’t there.
But something dark was unlocked this week, when one Twitter user tried to save the video to use for endless future meme fodder. “what the fuck happened when i exported this video,” they tweeted. What came back to them was, in a word, alarming. Every other second of the video moves at twice the speed, while what sounds like the Hereditary score plays underneath a twisted, demonically deep rendering of Khloé’s voice. This video was spat up from the bowels of Hell.
I think this version of the ad may be akin to the video from The Ring. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, it’s simply too early to tell. I am only on my third day of seven after watching it, so if my Twitter account goes radio silent next Wednesday, you definitely know that something—or some thing—got me.
Perhaps Khloé was warning us from the jump. After all, the crux of this new ad is a line that Khloé repeats twice, both at the beginning and end: “Prevent my next attack.”
We’re to assume that she’s talking about Nurtec’s ability to treat and prevent migraines, but it seems more layered than that. There’s a message she’s trying to communicate through her gritted row of pearly white veneers. Whether it’s a plea for help or a warning of what’s to come is anyone’s guess. But either way, I just heard something amazing!
