The horror genre has been an especially fertile ground for memorable immersive marketing. Here are 12 examples of campaigns that successfully used horror to get lots of, um, eyeballs.
This beach-set video is one of several clips hosted on the page
Crisis Zero, which appears to be documenting an impending zombie apocalypse but is actually viral marketing for the forthcoming
World War Z.
World War Z
World War Z
“Take This Lollipop” took home honors from Cannes for creator Jason Zada, thanks to the online experience’s widely shared and rather unsettling depiction of the potentially creepy downside to our social media usage.
“Take This Lollipop”
In a South African promotion for the impending second season of
Walking Dead in 2012, a fake romantic-comedy trailer played before the beginning of a real movie, during which a “real” zombie wandered into the theater. Admit it, you’d have been terrified if you were there.
In order to promote the forthcoming horror movie,
You’re Next, marketers grafted images onto posters for other Lionsgate movie posters–images that looked like reflections revealing the killers from the movie over viewers’ shoulders.
In the movie, the killers are frequently shown observing their prey; the movie poster illusions worked to make viewers feel like they were being hunted.
An online version of the campaign planted similar images in the Facebook pages of
other Lionsgate horror movies.
In 2010, Lionsgate found a clever way to channel the world’s brief fascination with random interaction site
into an ingenious, chilling bit of viral marketing. Perhaps you were forwarded the video in which two hopeful Internet boys think they’re about to see some skin, and end up seeing so much more.
An ambient marketing plan for
The Last Exorcism II interrupted a bunch of ladies’ hair salon visits with a visit from a highly acrobatic young lady able to mimic the
“possessed” movements of the film’s lead character.
One of the most masterful viral marketing efforts for a horror film was also one of the first. In 1999, Artisan Entertainment
rolled out the faux-documentary
Blair Witch Project with a pre-release focus online on the supposed directors of the film, who they claimed had
disappeared. The resulting hype helped spread word-of-mouth about the movie far and wide, propelling it to eventually become one of the most
profitable movies of all time. Members of The Haxans, the team behind the film, would go on to form Campfire, an agency specializing in immersive campaigns that blend fiction and reality.
When it came time to promote
Sadako 3-D, from the franchise that spawned
The Ring movies, Japanese marketers tried a number of tactics, including having the lead character throw out the
first pitch at a baseball game.
When the team behind
Resident Evil was promoting the game’s latest iteration in 2012, it created the
No Hope Left website to show how humanity was suffering amidst zombie attacks and disseminated videos like this one.
Also promoting the latest
Resident Evil game, a
human butcher shop was created, in perhaps the grossest PR stunt ever.
Because the 2013 film
Dead Man Down hinges on a witnessed murder, agency Thinkmodo created an
elevator murder experiment, wherein users witnessed a “murder” and had to decide what to do about it. Plenty of YouTube commenters cried BS, and those who believed it was real thought it went too far, but all of the reactions helped beat the drum for the film.
The team promoting German horror channel 13th Street designed special bowling balls with spray gun artist Oliver Paass that look like decapitated heads. They were placed in an actual bowling alley.
The viral campaign for 2012’s
Paranormal Activity 4 involved YouTube videos from a social media-savvy new character tangentially tied into the series. Watching the videos, it seems as though he might be incurring some light demon possession.
“Paranormal Activity 4”
“Paranormal Activity 4”
Is it better to be loved or feared? While much marketing talk centers on the notion of brand love, perhaps as many of our buying decisions are essentially motivated by fear. If it isn’t the fear of missing out, it’s some other strain of dread that spurs consumers to whip out credit cards en masse. This could explain why horror–the genre that can most fully explore and exploit our fears–has yielded so many advertising gems.
The Crisis Zero website came online recently, apparently counting down until some sort of end of days scenario,and reporting on strange happenings along the way. It even includes footage of these instances as they occur–an ATM surveillance tape that ends in a customer running away, a happy couple on the beach who appear to meet with something horrific. While almost anyone who’s spent enough time on the Internet in the past few years would recognize this site and its videos as viral marketing for a horror movie (in this case, the forthcoming World War Z), there’s just something chilling about the idea of horror content leaking out of a movie and into one’s real life in some form.
Of course, World War Z is far from the first film to use such tactics. Since The Blair Witch Project jump-started the ambient horror marketing trend with its innovative efforts in 1999, many others have figured out new and exciting ways to frighten fans into submission. Have a look through the slide show above for 12 of the most effective horror-based campaigns of all time. (If you dare, that is.)
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