A Boost Juice store has been slammed for going “too far” with its Halloween decorations after “gory” images of severed limbs were strung across the Western Australian shop.
Staff at the store, in Cockburn Gateway Shopping Centre, 23km south of Perth, were forced to take down the decorations after photos showing cardboard cutouts of bloodied hands and feet, were shared to a local Facebook group on Thursday.
“I think it’s appalling to have something this graphic where people walk by,” the person who shared the photos wrote in the viral post, which wracked up over 130 comments.
“Already some are finding it hard with their kids to even walk into Big W and Kmart where they have the skeletons and ghouls etc. I don’t understand what severed limbs have to do with Halloween. This is just appalling to have for a shop in my opinion.”
Other shoppers were quick to slam the choice of decorations, with one person likening the store to a “butcher’s shop” and another suggesting the display looked “like cutouts from real life injuries”.
“There is definitely a line when it comes to this gory stuff and this is too far,” one person commented.
“With everything happening in the world right now, the horrific images we’re seeing of Palestinian children, this is in very poor taste,” said another.
However, not everyone was left horrified over the display, which one person arguing it would “teach kids resilience”.
“Kids being scared for two minutes isn’t a world-ending sort of moment, it’s really not hard to explain that they’re fake,” one comment read.
Boost Juice Australia’s general manager has confirmed the decorations have since been taken down.
“As soon as we became aware of this type of decoration we asked the team to remove it from display as this is not part of who we are and how we want our brand represented,” they said in a statement to Yahoo News.
While the general manager said “fun Halloween is aligned” to the brand, they said “frightening and gruesome Halloween is not”.
News.com.au has reached out to Boost Juice Australia for comment.