10 Best Horror Movie Marketing Campaigns, From M3GAN To The Blair Witch Project

Summary

• Horror movies require strategic marketing to captivate audiences and deliver thrills, avoiding misrepresentation to maintain engagement.
• Iconic horror films have employed innovative marketing tactics, such as viral online dancing, real-life cursed tapes, and eerie, real-world stunts.
• Successful marketing campaigns in horror movies often involve ambiguous teasers, interactive puzzles, and immersive real-world experiences to build suspense.

Historically, horror movies have used many notable gimmicks to attract viewers. Since horror is a genre that often elicits visceral reactions and can divide audiences, marketing is essential in keeping audiences engaged while still fearful.Mis-marketing can ruin a movie, not attract the right audience, or mislead the plot entirely. Many good movies have suffered from bad marketing, though horror films are not often on these lists. Horror marketing frequently borrows elements from its peers, including found footage, intentionally vague teasers, and guerrilla marketing tactics.

Even some horror movies as recent as 2024 have distinguished themselves with their marketing, standing out in a year filled with scary releases. The expansiveness of the genre allows for a wide variety of techniques to reach audiences. Many agree that horror has had some of the most iconic marketing campaigns of all time.

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10 Saw X’s AMC Spoof

Saw X (2023)

For the promotion of Saw X, Lionsgate remade the iconic Nicole Kidman AMC introduction video with Saw’s Billy the Puppet. Instead of Kidman talking about movie magic, the video features Billy the Puppet’s perspective on movies. The teaser recreated the AMC advertisement shot for shot, including some Saw easter eggs for fans. Billy even watches footage from the Saw franchise. As an example of the humor, instead of Kidman’s line, “heartbreak feels good in a place like this,” Billy says, “self-amputation feels good in a place like this,” which is a direct reference to the Saw franchise.

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The official video was short-lived on the internet, but many viewers downloaded and reposted the promo on other platforms before its removal. The promo is still unofficially available online. AMC’s “We Make Movies Better” advertisement has become synonymous with the brand, making the spoof highly recognizable and memorable for both Saw and AMC fans.

9 Chucky’s Take On Toy Story

Child’s Play (2019)

Since Child’s Play and Toy Story 4 were released on the same date, their marketing team took the opportunity to acknowledge the thematic overlaps between the films. Both movies are about toys but with vastly different tones. Child’s Play had to contend with the fact that Toy Story 4 was a much more anticipated release. Child’s Play is the 2019 remake of the 1988 horror film of the same name. Despite their marketing strategies, Toy Story 4 made over 20 times the revenue of the Child’s Play

Film	Worldwide Box-Office Revenue
Toy Story 4	$1.073 billion
Child’s Play	See more : 10 Best ’80s Buddy Cop Movies $44.9 million

To promote Child’s Play, the marketing team released posters of the demonic doll Chucky terrorizing the Toy Story characters. Advertisements included Chucky melting Rex with a lighter, smiling at a bloody knife in Mr. Potato Head, and pointing a smoking ray gun at a fallen Buzz Lightyear. Without explicitly correlating the two films, the ads acknowledged the similarities between them, showing Chucky’s dominance. Young fans of the Toy Story franchise were sure to remember the traumatic images of their favorite toys being tortured.

8 M3GAN’s Online Viral Dancing

M3GAN (2022)

M3GAN’s marketing relied heavily on the doll’s iconic look, which fans could easily replicate. M3GAN gained popularity online, with actors dressed as the doll showing up at events to dance in her eerie style, as seen in the movie. The dance trend went on to gain popularity outside of M3GAN impersonators, with the choreography going viral online. The dance in the film was not originally in the script but was impromptu during filming and was fortunately included. Eight actors dressed as M3GAN danced to a Taylor Swift song at the premiere.

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Being a technological invention, M3GAN also had a significant online presence. She would engage in discourse on X with fellow creepy doll Chucky. They feuded over which was the better killer doll. This marketing technique appealed to fans of both properties. M3GAN’s online engagement continued after the film premiere, as the marketing team would respond to negative social media reviews as M3GAN. The marketing for M3GAN was highly involved and effective in popularizing the film.

7 The Ring’s Real Tape

The Ring (2002)

The Ring, an American film based on an iconic 1998 Japanese horror movie Ringu, revolves around a cursed videotape. In the film, viewers of the tape receive a phone call telling them they are going to die in seven days. Once they see the video, they are haunted by a ghost girl named Samara (Sadako in Ringu), who has become an iconic horror character. Taking advantage of this premise, the marketing team created their own version of the tape in real life.

Late at night, television commercials would be interrupted by the cursed tape with no context, passing the jinx onto unsuspecting viewers. They also had a website where visitors could enter their friends’ contact information, and the team would send them a message about the curse. The emails contained the cursed video and once opened, the viewer would receive a voice call saying, “Seven days.” This made the movie feel much more realistic, since the marketing was able to immerse the audience into the film’s universe.

6 IT’s Eerie Balloons

IT (2017)

Part of IT‘s marketing involved tying balloons to sewer grates in Sydney, Australia. Even from afar, viewers could tell what was being marketed, as red balloons and sewers are both synonymous with the terror of Pennywise. Photos of the balloons went viral. It was a form of guerrilla marketing, bringing the horror to real life and making involvement with the film unavoidable.

The marketing team also decided to reveal the full image of Bill Skårsgard as Pennywise in its promotional materials. Typically, horror movies keep their monsters secret to build suspense, but IT did not try to hide how scary Pennywise can be. Besides these real-world manifestations, IT also greatly benefited from word of mouth.

IT
is the highest-grossing horror movie ever and in the top ten of best-performing R-rated films.

5 Psycho’s Strict Attendance Policy

Psycho (1960)

Pyscho’s director, Alfred Hitchcock, known as the “master of suspense,” was determined to keep the movie’s iconic twist a secret. Halfway through the film, the leading actress, Janet Leigh, dies in Psycho’s infamous shower scene. Knowing the twist would ruin the movie’s plot, which shifts the main characters. Scream borrowed this marketing tactic in 1997, heavily advertising Drew Barrymore’s involvement in the film despite her character’s death in the first scene.

Hitchcock bought copies of Robert Bloch’s 1959 book of the same name to prevent audiences from reading the twist. He also denied pre-release cast interviews and private screenings for critics. Most notably, the film was advertised with a “no late admissions” policy that theaters were encouraged to enforce to keep the twist from being ruined. This exclusivity made the movie successful, piquing the interest of many theatergoers who wanted to learn more about this secretive film.

4 Cloverfield’s Vague Teaser

Cloverfield (2008)

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Cloverfield’s marketing campaign benefited from audience curiosity, leaving much of the film unknown, including the movie’s title. The first glimpse at the film had a prime-time placement, showing in theaters before Transformers in 2007. It showed a found footage recording of a going-away party among friends, which is interrupted by tremors and objects falling from the sky. By the end of the video, the Statue of Liberty’s head is lying in the street with the release date on the screen. The trailer carefully doesn’t reveal what the monster is, leaving the plot as vague as the title.

Reportedly, the Cloverfield script wasn’t even finished before the trailer was released. Like The Blair Witch Project, which found success advertising its footage as real, Cloverfield’s marketing frames its disaster as if it really happened. They even had a website, titled after the film’s release date, where they would post intermittent updates and release new images of the destruction teased in the trailer. The site has since become defunct, but fans still remember the terror of checking it for new content.

3 Smile’s Well-Placed Actors

Smile (2022)

Smile‘s marketing was both subtle and eye-catching. The film hired actors to sit behind home plate at MLB games and give the movie’s infamous eerie grin. The television cameras could pick up the smiles from the premium seats, broadcasting them across the country. So as not to be confused with regular happy park-goers, the actors wore neon shirts that read “Smile,” providing just enough context when investigated properly.

Since smiling is a symptom of the curse in the film, seeing it in a real-life context made it seem real. Photos of the actors went viral online, as viewers were eager to share their experience and ensure everyone else witnessed the same thing. This marketing tactic relied on word-of-mouth and cost only the price of the baseball ticket, but found great success.

2 Longlegs’ Cryptic Messaging

Longlegs (2024)

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The trailers for Longlegs provided little context about the film while still creating intrigue. A coded language was created for the movie and used in marketing. The Seattle Times even printed an encoded poem with a footnote reading “Printed at the request of Longlegs,” reminiscent of the communication style of the real-life Zodiac Killer. This promotion was posted on the official LonglegsX account for all to see. An immersive experience in the world of the film rewarded those who took the time to decode the language.

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Longlegs kept much of the film secret. Before the film’s release, Longlegs‘ production company, Neon, posted several eerie promotional videos involving 911 calls and imagery of family deaths. This gives very little away about the movie’s plot while still piquing the audience’s curiosity. The film also advertised the involvement of Nicolas Cage, though it never showed him in the trailers or promotional materials. Like many other horror movies, Longlegs main selling point was that it was scary, but in a way that audiences had to find out for themselves.

Longlegs
made $22.6 million at box-office on its opening weekend.

1 Blair Witch’s Real Life Marketing

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

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The Blair Witch Project had one of the most intensive and well-known movie marketing campaigns to date. Set in 1994, the film is a documentary attempt by three film students investigating the myth of the Blair Witch in Maryland. The movie is the footage found and compiled after the students’ mysterious disappearance. The film was made to look and feel real, as if the students were actually missing. The perceived intent of the film was to help find the students.

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After the film ended, audiences would return to their cars to see that missing posters had been left, looking for any insights into the filmmakers’ whereabouts. On the flyers was a link to the movie’s website, where people could log on to learn more about the victims and the Blair Witch through fabricated police reports and news articles. Blair Witch’s marketing was actually assisted by the limited internet access at the time, which made it harder for people to disprove the legend and the film’s validity.

Other minor elements were also in play to make the film seem real. The Sci-Fi Channel aired a fake documentary titled Curse Of The Blair Witch to boost the legend’s validity. The actors agreed to lie low after the film’s release to make their disappearance seem believable, with IMDb even listing them as “presumed dead.” Many other films since have been inspired by The Blair Witch Project’s sales strategies, which set a precedent for viral and realistic marketing campaigns in horror movies.

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