YouTube Yanks Horror Film Ad For Violating Its ‘Shocking Content’ Policy

YouTube has removed a pre-roll ad for the upcoming horror film The Nun after viewers complained that a jump scare contained within was misleading and unnecessarily disturbing.

The ad for the Warner Bros. Pictures film — about a nun, a Catholic priest, and a novice sent by the Vatican to investigate a suicide in 1950s Romania — features a fake volume control being turned down before a decayed nun’s face suddenly appears onscreen and shrieks. One tweet on Sunday cautioning users about the clip has amassed more than 130,000 shares (see below), and garnered a response from YouTube.

Yesterday, the company removed the ad for violating its “shocking content policy,” the company said, linking to a Help page

clarifying its ad standards. Polygon also notes that users can denote that they do not wish to see horror-related ads within their personalized ad settings.

This isn’t the first time that viewers have balked at YouTube ads for a horror film. In June, the U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld complaints when two ads for Sony Pictures‘ Insidious: The Last Key — one of which featured a humanoid creature probing the throat of a  young woman with claw-like fingers — ran before videos aimed at children.