The Past Decade of Memorable Horror Movie Marketing
Do you follow baseball?
If you’re reading from the UK, the answer is most likely no. But if you’re interested in horror films, you may have seen the creepy individuals lurking in the crowd of the Yankees and Mets games last week. This was all to promote a horror film called Smile which comes in the UK on the 28th September this year.
Still from the upcoming movie Smile (Paramount)
It’s ingenious marketing – how do you get people to be afraid of your film? You infiltrate the target audience’s own reality, shattering their perception of what’s real, and what isn’t.
So then, let’s look back at some of the more memorable horror movie marketing campaigns of the last decade …
The Nun
Still from The Nun (Warner Bros.)
Ah, who doesn’t like a good ol’ fashioned Jumpscare?
Erm, Youtube’s Content Policy – apparently.
In the summer of 2018, Corin Hardy’s The Nun film – one of the now many entries into The Conjuring Universe – was promoted on Youtube with an Advert containing a jumpscare.
You can watch it here below – be warned, you may soil yourself.
To any unsuspecting viewer at the time, frightening right? The real controversy surrounding this advert is the fact that it was totally un-skippable. Quite an unfair compulsory exercise to any unsuspecting child who was just trying to watch a fortnite win compilation. YouTube quickly removed the advert, but its clever (and mildly annoying) legacy lives on.
Carrie
Still from Carrie (Sony Pictures)
The remake of one of the most iconic horror films of all time didn’t go down well critically, but you can’t knock the marketing.
A hidden camera prank was set up in a New York Coffee Shop. Amongst real customers, a scene was played out where a man accidentally spills Coffee on a woman’s laptop. She then goes on absolutely ballistic telekinetic outburst, slamming him to the wall, pushing chairs and tables with her mind, before finally screaming so loud that pictures fly off the wall.
The video ‘Telekinetic Coffee Shop Surpirse’ went viral, accumulating a massive 78 million views on YouTube
In retrospect though, how did they not see the wire?
Paranormal Activity 4
Still from Paranormal Activity 4 (Paramount Pictures)
In 2012, Paramount unleashed an entire social media operation onto Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube for the release of Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman’s entry into the wildly successful found footage franchise.
Following a tech-savvy dad named Jacob Degloshi, we were treated to an entirely new story tied into the universe . In classic Paranormal Activity style, a seemingly normal person’s life was flipped upside down, and we witnessed it all through V/H/S tapes and CCTV recordings. Things got real weird, real fast. You can check out the original Twitter account here.
What’s your favourite horror film marketing campaign? Let me know in the comments down below.
