A billboard selling Osgood Perkins’ upcoming crime-horror, ‘Longlegs’
| Photograph Credit score: X/ @Longlegsfilm

Let’s admit it; the horror film advertising and marketing playbook is a predictably well-trodden path. Roll out the monster, cue the soar scares, rinse and repeat. Each different horror movie pats itself on the again with a immediate, “the scariest of the last decade”, flashing throughout the display screen, waxing lyrical of its area of interest new indie filmmaker’s experimental new tackle the style, “by no means seen earlier than”.

However Neon has been doing issues. Freaky issues.

The manufacturing firm’s advertising and marketing workforce has orchestrated a symphony of suspense that in some way seems like a chilly sweat on a sultry summer time evening. It’s a remarkably Hitchcockian train in stoking concern and curiosity, making your pores and skin crawl earlier than a single body has flickered on the display screen. Neon has managed to carve out a singular house for Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs; their method to the a lot anticipated crime-horror has been to embrace the unknown and make it the movie’s central draw.

The preliminary teaser was very nonchalantly dropped again in January. It was a visible enigma — a 36-second clip that includes creepy photos of blood-soaked rooms and a haunting 911 name. No plot spoilers, no clear hints, only a tantalisingly obscure glimpse into one thing terrifying. Sufficient to ship the web right into a frenzy, with followers dissecting each body with forensic precision in seek for solutions.

Neon’s technique is a love letter to the viral advertising and marketing playbooks of found-footage stalwarts, Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Mission, the place thriller has all the time been the key ingredient.

Quickly got here the posters in February, together with a couple of extra creepy snippets, after which lastly a full size trailer in April. They revealed simply sufficient to maintain the viewers on tenterhooks however by no means sufficient to spoil the shock. This breadcrumb method saved audiences engaged, forcing them to play detective. It’s a feat, far and few between, within the rising age of immediate gratification, the place spoilers and overexposure kill a movie’s buzz means earlier than its launch.

Following this, Neon’s marketing campaign rolled out a collection of equally cryptic releases. Their technique has been to make the viewers an lively participant within the horror, inviting them to piece collectively the puzzle and expertise the concern firsthand. Every teaser, every poster, was one other engaging style of its sinister secrets and techniques, main audiences deeper down this twisted rabbit gap.

The pièce de résistance? A telephone quantity on a Los Angeles billboard. Dial it, and also you’re handled to Nicolas Cage, in character, whispering niceties in a voice that might curdle milk. It was an excellent piece of guerrilla advertising and marketing that showcased a deep understanding of horror’s primal attraction: the concern of the unknown.

What makes Neon’s marketing campaign a throwback to a golden period of movie advertising and marketing is its skill to make motion pictures really feel particular, virtually like forbidden fruit. Opposite to digital-age sensibilities, there existed a time once you couldn’t simply Google each single element a couple of movie. You needed to wait, breath bated, for the subsequent morsel of data, the subsequent piece of the puzzle. Prompt entry typically dilutes the magic and the Longlegs marketing campaign faucets into this virtually nostalgic notion and crafts an expertise that feels timeless and ridiculously efficient.

Neon appears to have performed into the movie’s strengths fantastically. Even Perkins himself, acknowledged Neon’s brilliance in dealing with the promotion; in an interview, he revealed that he gave Neon carte blanche to go wild with their technique, a choice that has clearly paid off.

Then there’s the movie itself. Longlegs isn’t simply coasting on a wave of intelligent advertising and marketing. Early evaluations are in, and critics are singing its praises as a brand new horror benchmark. Set within the ‘90s, starring Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage, it’s a darkish, satanic serial killer story that basically appears to inquire: what if the horror in The Silence of the Lambs was on steroids?

Cage, sporting white face paint and delivering strains in a chilling high-pitched voice, performs a killer orchestrating grotesque murders from afar. He has beforehand described his function as a person “listening to voices” and likened his character to a “possessed Geppetto,” who creates unsettling dolls. By protecting Cage’s character largely hidden in promotional materials, they’ve constructed an aura of malice and menace round him, not like something we’ve ever seen him do earlier than (and that is Nic Cage we’re speaking about).

The reactions from early screenings have additionally been nothing wanting traumatic. Attendees have taken to social media, dubbing Longlegs an unsurprising, “scariest movie of the yr”, solely this time, there might have been some semblance of fact to their reward.

X has been extolling the movie’s horrifying expertise ever since, with every description extra outrageous than the earlier. Many have waxed lyrical over Perkins’ ambiance of relentless dread and meticulously crafted scares that really feel spawned by the Antichrist itself. Studies of viewers members crying and fleeing the theatre in terror have solely added to the movie’s lore.

As we method the movie’s mid-July launch, the thrill exhibits no indicators of slowing. Currently, advertising and marketing methods for movie and TV have moulded us into cynics the place hype inevitably and inadvertently interprets to disappointment in a majority of circumstances. However Longlegs appears to have already cemented its place as a must-watch theatrical expertise. It seems like a real ‘main movement image occasion’ that may be trusted to ship on its murky guarantees after which some.

Longlegs hits theatres on July 12.