The horror movie marketing hall of fame

Films like ‘The Blair Witch Project,’ ‘Smile,’ and ‘Obsession’ built buzz on a budget—and offer lessons for every marketer.

October 28, 2026

• 30 min read

TOPICS: Brand Strategy / Creative & Storytelling / Brand Storytelling (Strategy)

Horror movie marketing is low budget, high reward, and built one one tricky problem—getting people hooked without giving the scare away.

In this episode of Marketing Brew Weekly, Jennimai Nguyen, Katie Hicks, and Kelsey Sutton induct five horror movie marketing campaigns into the Horror Movie Hall of Fame. Each one holds a lesson for any marketer, whether you work in entertainment or not.

Key takeaways

Build a world, not just an ad. The Blair Witch Project and Longlegs used fake websites and real-world touch points to turn curiosity into word of mouth, which beats a big ad buy.
Tap the fandom you already have. Backrooms went after a built-in online audience instead of starting from scratch, stoking interest with fan communities that already existed.
Surprise people where they don’t expect you. Smile planted creepy grins at sports broadcasts, which earned about 170 million trackable impressions in a low-risk, high-reward way.
Make your brand feel real. Obsession turned a $750k budget into $522m worldwide with a real-life prop, a text-me billboard, and a character who lived on Spotify and Letterboxd.

Watch the episode

Listen to the episode

Jennimai: Welcome to Marketing Brew Weekly, Morning Brew Inc.’s Podcast for the marketing industry. I’m Jennimai Nguyen.

Katie: I’m Katie Hicks.

Kelsey: And I’m Kelsey Sutton.

Jennimai: It is officially spooky season, despite marketers really trying to usher it in, I feel like earlier and earlier with Pumpkin Spice campaigns in August.

Katie: July even.

Jennimai: What’s that about? Every year we push the limits. But it is solidly spooky season now and every year there’s kind of an annual appreciation of horror movies.

But this year it kind of feels particularly pertinent to recognize horror movie marketing campaigns. Do you guys think so?

Kelsey: Oh, absolutely.

Jennimai: Right.

Katie: We’ve seen some very big horror movie marketing campaigns this year.

Jennimai: Exactly. Yeah.

Kelsey: And I feel like we constantly see a lot of really fun, creative and interesting sort of stuff pushing the boundaries in a lot of ways.

Jennimai: Yeah. And the marketing campaigns are obviously very interesting and fun to look at for anyone in the entertainment marketing industry, but it’s really got lessons I feel like for any marketer.

So today we are going to take a closer look at what we are calling the Horror Movie Hall of Fame, five movies with impressive marketing campaigns that have either stood the test of time or we think will stand the test of time coming up here. And most importantly, have valuable takeaways for all marketers, not just those in the entertainment industry.

And if you need any more convincing, consider that horror movies are typically low budget, high reward, and they do have to navigate the pretty significant obstacle of getting people interested without giving too much away. And that’s something that I think any marketer can relate to.

So stay tuned to hear what we can learn from the horror movies that have made it and some of our favorite picks too.

Kelsey: Yeah. I’m so excited for this and I think we all had a lot of fun kind of pulling this together because we were like, “Oh yeah, that scared me. Wait, that also scared me.”

Jennimai: But in a good way, yes.

Kelsey: And then we were like, “Hang on, I have to sleep with a night light.”

The Blair Witch Project: World building marketing campaign

Kelsey: So I am going to start things off with our first pick for the Horror Marketing Hall of Fame. And I think this is a pick because we simply cannot talk about horror movie marketing without talking about this movie, which is The Blair Witch Project.

Katie: The first movie that scared me in middle school.

Kelsey: Exactly. Oh my God. It’s a little bit of a throwback. It was released in 1999, but I really think it sort of set the standard for IRL world building.

So I’m just going to give you the very kind of brief overview, which is The Blair Witch Project was marketed as being a found-footage documentary. Documentary filmmakers were making this movie and then the footage was found and they were never found and they were missing.

And to market the movie, that’s exactly how the studio framed it, which was they launched a guerrilla marketing website called blairwitch.com. It really seeded the mythology. There were fictional police reports, newspaper articles, journals, interviews, evidence, photos, and tons of people saw this. And it’s very much this, is this real, is this not real sort of situation.

Jennimai: Well, a lot of people saw it before any trailers even came out, which made it into people actually believed that these people were actually missing.

And I feel like that’s what was key to this campaign is that they convinced an entire audience to believe in this actual world, which I feel like is so hard to do.

Katie: It’s also so elaborate and at a time when the internet was so young to have this much stuff online created and posted, I feel like really made it convincing to people at the time.

Kelsey: Yeah. And I think something to note is I think this would be very hard to pull off today because consumers are savvier and more suspicious of things like this. Because it’s been done before, there’s sometimes a thinking of like, wait a second, is this marketing?

But at the time it really was not like that.

I think obviously the fact that it’s like a documentary found footage style film really lends itself to that.

But I think to me, the world building, which also included people were handing out missing flyers. There was this whole conversation around this. And so the fact that that drove so much interest in the film itself in a way that, again, not very replicatable, but I think the thing that is replicatable, and I’d love to know both of your thoughts on this, is just really inviting audiences into this world and it’s kind of like, but there’s still the gap of like, wait, what actually happened?

What actually is this? I have to know.

Katie: Well, it encourages internet sleuthing. People are suddenly spending so much time getting immersed in the lore of your movie because of this marketing campaign.

They’re clicking all the links, they’re going through this website. They’re trying to figure out is this real or not?

And you’re looking for eyeballs and to get people that involved in your campaign is something that I think you can’t buy.

Jennimai: I think it’s also like they figured out how to bring their world to the real world in a believable way.

They’re saying these people were missing, having people passing out flyers and actually asking, “Have you seen this person?” That’s something you would do in a real missing person scenario, especially in 1999, pre-internet, pre...well, internet was there, but it was early internet.

Katie: Young internet.

Jennimai: Exactly. So figuring out what elements of the specific world that you are operating in you can kind of convincingly bring to the real world and get people to interact with, I think is so key. And as you said, Kelsey, really builds that world and makes it so there are multiple touch points that people can get involved in.

And then with the internet being so young, it was really right place, right time for this particular movie and its campaign of like, okay, how do we get people to use this tool in a way that they’re not maybe all that familiar with and helps add to this intrigue and sense of mystery and wonder that is totally difficult to do today because people are internet savvy in a very different way.

Kelsey: But I think what it does and it reflects, and we see this a lot in other marketing, other movie marketing, but other marketing in general is really leaning into the creativity and participation element.

People are discussing this on forums. They’re trying to drum up curiosity like, “What is this?” And really get people talking among their peers.

And that, as we know, is so powerful and is so much more powerful than a huge ad buy.

And I think one of the things that’s really important to note here is The Blair Witch Project was made on a teeny, teeny tiny budget and then of course made hundreds of millions of dollars in the US and worldwide. And so I think at one point it was the most profitable indie film in history for decades, I believe.

So one of the things that I think is so interesting here is we see really creative marketing because the budget is shoestring and so it has to rely on these other things.

But we know that word of mouth, talking about it with your friends, discussing on a forum, that is not pricey necessarily, but it requires a lot of legwork to get people invested. So they do talk.

Jennimai: The forums have just really changed, but they still exist.

Katie: But even the ones that are still the same, they had the students in the movie listed as missing, presumed dead on IMDb.

Jennimai: So clever.

Katie: Which is still around today. I just feel like they really left no stone unturned. They really nailed every little detail in making this seem as real as possible.

Jennimai: Yeah. Being really meticulous about those details I think is what actually turns it into something believable is in all of the different ways that you could get people to believe in this idea that these are real missing people. That is so important.

I will say that even with the internet not being new anymore and it being kind of difficult to really pull off this ruse today, we are still seeing movie campaigns and I imagine other marketing campaigns still take notes from Blair Witch.

I covered Bugonia last year. Is that when that movie came out? And they took a page right out of Blair Witch’s notebook? What’s the phrase?

Kelsey: Playbook.

Jennimai: Playbook. Gosh, mixing my metaphors here.

But took a page right from them and launched a website where you could report people that you were suspecting were actually aliens, which was key to the plot in Bugonia as well.

And they reported a lot of engagement on that website. It was a place where you could learn a lot more about the little details of the movie and people who were interested in it had a really good time there. So I think people are still doing it even if it’s difficult.

And I think that audiences, even if they recognize that obviously this is not a place to actually report people that you think are aliens, buying into that for a couple minutes while you’re there is still an experience that people enjoy and is worth creating, even if it’s not really actually tricking them into it. Right.

Kelsey: You’re playing along. You’re having fun as you’re doing it. And again, it also makes you excited about how this dynamic maybe plays out in the film itself.

Jennimai: Yeah, builds an emotional connection.

Longlegs: The curiosity gap marketing campaign

Katie: Well, speaking of movies that drew from Blair Witch’s playbook, that brings us to our second movie in the Hall of Fame here, which is Longlegs, which came out a couple of years ago. I feel like this one really made the cut for us because it was world building similar to Blair Witch, but in the modern age and really tapped into true crime culture.

So the way that they kind of kicked off this marketing campaign was they ran an ad in the Seattle Times and had a cryptic cipher, which was key to the murderer in the movie that directed people to the birthdaymurders.net, which is a website that had information about the murders. It was very ’90s blog style. So similar in look to The Blair Witch Project website. And that’s because this movie took place in the ’90s, so very of the time.

And they had fake crime scene photos. It was very much like true crime style as if somebody was kind of tracking these murders and saying, “I think there might be a serial killer in the Seattle area.” So drumming up this kind of very organic-style blogging.

Jennimai: The podcasters of today…

Katie: Truly!

Jennimai: Ate it up.

Katie: And then they worked with true-crime creators to help drum up interest and get people to go to this website. And they were kind of posting like, “What is this website? What does this have to do with anything?” And then obviously on the website it talks about this murderer Longlegs, which then gets people interested in the movie.

I think another thing that was really interesting about the movie’s marketing is that Nicholas Cage played the murder in this movie and they refused to show any pictures of him. They would not put his face on anything. No one knew what his character looked like.

Jennimai: But we knew he was in the movie.

Katie: But we knew he was in the movie. And I think that helped drum up a lot of intrigue too. Got people interested in looking at this website and trying to get involved and eventually see this movie because they were like, “I don’t know what this scary creature murderer looks like.”

But there was another component of this too which kind of modernized it compared to Blair Witch, which was that they had a billboard that they put out in LA that had a number that you could call. And if you did, then Nicholas Cage’s character was singing Happy Birthday to you, which is again, the birthday murders part of the plot.

So just very drumming up intrigue in a lot of different ways and tapping into people’s curiosity. I think the curiosity gap is really what made this a successful marketing campaign.

Jennimai: Yeah. I feel like having a phone number on a billboard, it’s something you expect, but as soon as you put together that it’s for a movie, you’re like, “Oh, this is something I can actually call. What am I going to get on the other end of this?” And it’s so easy to just call the number that why wouldn’t you if you see it? Yeah, it’s an interesting kind of addendum to what Blair Witch originally did.

Kelsey: Yeah. I really like this interactivity element of it, encouraging people to do something maybe with a friend like, “I dare you to call it and see what it says.”

Because you know at that point, I think that there’s something spooky that’s going on. And I really think that that is so key, particularly again, horror we know in the movie space is such a communal experience. People go with their friends so that they’re all scared together. That is very much part of the experience of seeing some of these movies.

And so I think that to me, the element of that curiosity gap, what are you actually going to see, et cetera. But then that interactivity layered on top I think is really smart. I also love the idea of tapping into the true crime creator space. That feels like a very modern kind of take two.

But again, part of it that’s so interesting is kind of letting you as the audience member play along with this...we’re pretending that it’s real and that’s what makes it scary, that it could be real. And I think that that just really works well with the genre. And I think we’ve seen that again and again, but I think that’s very interesting. It kind of encourages you to buy in to the fiction of this film.

Katie: And by hiding Nicholas Cage’s character too, I think it created intrigue where people are like, “I really do want to investigate this website and click every link and look at all the photos that they present to me.”

And there was some other component too where they had kind of put stuff in a file that you could download if you went to a certain website. It was very much like DIY investigation.

And I think people, because they didn’t know what to expect, were encouraged to do that.

I will say though, one thing, I know one of their trailers was just a video of Maika Monroe who plays the main character, the detective in the movie—they played just her heartbeat at how scared she was while filming the movie when she first saw Nicholas Cage’s character. I will say the curiosity gap definitely got me. I saw this movie in the theater, but that almost made the reveal less interesting to me.

Jennimai: Oh, interesting.

Katie: I still think the marketing campaign was very good for this movie. It got me there and I went and I saw it, but his character scared me less than I though it would. That’s partially because of that trailer where it was like, oh my God, her heartbeat. How scary is this character going to be? And then I saw it and I was kind of like, oh, okay.

Kelsey: Yeah. Okay, but we got to talk about horror is built on anticipation and the dread and the fear of what is going to happen? And then it’s like, oh, okay. Okay. Now I know what’s happening. Still scary.

Katie: And I don’t want to speak for everybody because I’m somebody who likes horror movies. So someone who doesn’t might be like, oh my God, that was the scariest reveal I’ve ever seen. But for me, I was just kind of like, oh, I though my heart was going to burst out of my chest.

Jennimai: I mean, it’s an interesting call out though because it’s a piece of marketing that really worked and got you there and was interesting. And I think is pretty unique to this particular movie or the actor having an actual heartbeat that could be reported in that way. But it led to a little bit of a disappointment. But does that matter?

Kelsey: I think some people also have said online, some of the reviews say it was a little over hyped.

Jennimai: Interesting.

Kelsey: But again, the marketing campaign was so good that so many people were expecting to be so scared by this movie.

Jennimai: Right. So worked at the end of the day.

Kelsey: Yeah. Yeah.

Backrooms: The Easter eggs marketing campaign

Jennimai: All right. Well, we got to hear what else has made the Hall of Fame. Katie, I think you’ve also seen this next one. So can you walk us through our third entry into the Hall of Fame?

Katie: This one is one of the big movies that came out this year, which we obviously have to talk about, which is Backrooms. And the reason we chose Backrooms is because, again, just more digital world building and also dropping Easter eggs, which I think is a really interesting component of every campaign that we’re seeing these days.

Jennimai: Taylor Swift would like a word.

Kelsey: Yeah. Another Taylor Swift mention, obviously.

I think because this movie was based on a YouTube video and based on creating this idea of liminal spaces online, it was essential that they had to do some sort of really immersive online experience.

And the way that they did it in their marketing campaign was through an alternate reality game, also known as an ARG, which they teased with a commercial that aired on Pluto TV. And I think we have a clip of it that we can play.

Backrooms commercial

Captain Clark: Ahoy there, mateys! Now according to me, we’ve landed on the crystal shores of a bountiful land, a land filled with great deals. These bed bumps for the scallywags’ quarters. We’ve got it all. And the price is so low, you’ll think that you’re robbing me! Come visit Captain Clark’s Ottoman Empire. And the only thing you’ll be wanting is more space to keep it all.

Kelsey: Okay. This is so interesting because it’s not really scary at all and it’s a little bit baffling, but the very end you kind of see a flicker of the back rooms sort of…it looks a little off at the very end and it’s all very vintage looking, et cetera.

But I do think that for a property like Backrooms, which again, sort of steeped in internet lore, and then I believe the filmmaker had a short film kind of playing with this internet lore. There was already so much…there was so much interest in the concept that you have to kind of encourage where are people reading backroom stories or watching these videos and scaring themselves? You have to find that audience.

And this is a great way of doing it.

I think it only aired one time. And then of course it’s like, did you see this? It aired one time. It’s again, kind of encourages this investigation. Right.

Katie: And for those not familiar with the movie, that advertisement was for the business that is in the movie. So Captain Clark’s is the furniture store where you can enter the back rooms.

Jennimai: I see.

Katie: And the guy in the video is the main character who does end up going behind the wall into the back room.

Jennimai: Honestly, important context for me, someone who has not seen the movie.

But I think in taking this route with the marketing is so interesting to me because as someone who has not seen the movie or is not familiar with the lore at all, I see an ad like that and I’m like, “What’s happening here?” I didn’t even really get that it was for Backrooms to get me interested in the movie.

But I think Kelsey, you’re right that what really makes this campaign work and I think that all marketers should pay attention to is identifying when you have a rabid fandom at your fingertips already.

I think the original views on the Backrooms like YouTube videos are sitting at a million plus. And that was pre the movie coming out. So recognizing that there is already so much interest and how do you stoke that existing interest?

And then that word of mouth amongst your already most dedicated fans could spread to people who have no idea what Backrooms is, which is what I am. I had never heard of it before, but hearing how passionate the original fandom was for this and was so excited to see it to come to screen, that’s what piqued my interest more than the actual ad or marketing itself.

And I think it’s an interesting example of a lot of things working in tandem that mainly serves an audience that already existed. But recognizing when you have fandom at your fingertips, at your expense is so powerful and something that should not be overlooked.

Kelsey: And we’ve talked about the power of fandom and it’s like you have to treat them right. You can’t do them dirty. And I think that…

Jennimai: That was a treat for fans that knew what they were getting themselves into.

Katie: I mean, it is a niche thing. You have to be a fan that’s watching Pluto TV, that catches that this is... Is that the main character in the Backrooms movie that’s coming out soon? Oh my God, this must be Backrooms related. And you have to be willing to text this number because when you texted the number, then you would get a flyer for the game that you could then play online that was related to the movie.

So yeah, it’s a really niche strategy, but I think to your point, if you have a strong enough fandom, it really works and it creates this if you know, you know, kind of marketing campaign that taps into your brand fans.

Jennimai: Yeah. And if you don’t have fandom, there’s still ways to tap into fandom.

You can partner with someone who has a really strong fandom. You can find an entertainment property that has it, for example. I think it’s just so applicable outside of just this particular instance too, that I don’t know. When I’m a fan of something, I really ride or die for it. I think that is just so true across the passion behind fandom.

Smile: Low risk, low cost viral marketing

Kelsey: Yeah, definitely. I think so. Okay. But there are some properties, some horror movies that do not have a built-in fandom. You’re just starting from scratch.

Jennimai: Brand new.

Kelsey: And that will bring me to our next Horror Movie Marketing Hall of Fame, which is Smile, which came out in 2022. And the sort of big takeaway here is they hired...so I feel like the premise of Smile is somebody smiles really scarily at you and then you get cursed.

Katie: Yeah, you get cursed and then you smile at them and it keeps going.

Kelsey: Yeah. So it’s ultimately a scary smile.

So what they did is the marketing department planted actors who had really creepy smiles at very non-horror movie places, baseball games, The Today Show, NFL games, and they were just in the stands looking freaky. And then it showed up on broadcasts and people were like, “What is this?” And again…

Katie: I remember seeing one, it was the woman in the yellow shirt behind some... It was some clip of the woman in a yellow shirt behind the picture.

Kelsey: Yeah. And she looked so scary. I mean, this is really understanding the IP that you’re working with, but it really got people going, “Oh my gosh, what is this? What is this?” I think some of them were wearing a shirt that said Smile, et cetera.

But there still is that curiosity gap that got so many people talking and so many people talking in non-horror movie spaces. I thought that was just so smart. I think that ultimately...so this work won, I think a bronze Shorty award. So there’s actually a lot of data about how successful this was, but I think it was 170 million trackable views across major platforms were clips of or photos of these people marketing.

And I just think to me, finding that visibility is also really low-risk and low-cost. If you hire somebody to go sit at a baseball game and look creepy and then nobody notices, okay, who cares?

But you do, you will notice, somebody’s going to notice, and it’s going to really travel. I really think it was optimized to go viral on the internet.

Jennimai: It was just so easy to pull off ultimately. You don’t have to train someone to really understand the character that you’re putting out there. You don’t have to make sure that they’re not representing your brand or your property in a way that you don’t want it to. They just have to sit there and smile in kind of a strange way.

Katie: And you don’t have to buy airtime because they’re already showing up on broadcast that we’re going to broadcast either way.

Jennimai: Yeah, because it was strange. I do think that strategically placing them in places that you would not expect them to be really worked to their advantage. And that is something that people can always take advantage of. It’s like, “Oh, where might someone not expect my brand to be?” But when they do see me here, it’s, sorry to use a cliche, a surprise and delight, but it…

Katie: Really A surprise and scare, perhaps.

Jennimai: And scare! Yeah. And in this case, we wanted to be scared, so it really was delightful that it was working in this way, but it is just a great example of being in the right place at the right time, but just not the place that anyone would expect you to be.

Katie: And it fit in with the premise of the movie, which was that people are getting infected or whatever with this person in everyday scenarios, whether you’re at a baseball game or a doctor’s office or whatever. And I think that brought that real world component to the marketing campaign where you’re like, “Oh my God, what if this was real?” And people were doing that on a baseball broadcast?

Obsession: Real-world connection marketing campaign

Kelsey: Yeah. Yeah. Let’s go to the next one. What’s our final one, Jennimai?

Jennimai: Well, it’s kind of funny because across all of our Hall of Fame examples, I do think that the real world is so important. Before we reveal our last pick, I want to kind of call out that I do feel like that is something that is appearing across marketing because everyone is craving real world connection in so many different ways. And it’s clearly working across industries, especially in horror, especially with a lot of these being such recent examples.

All of that preambled to say, our last entry into the Hall of Fame is, of course, one of the biggest films of this last year, Obsession, which we are officially entering in because of its really impressive use of interactive real world elements. And I think this film particularly event-ized the theater experience and emphasized FOMO in a really interesting way.

I want to call out the budget and the return here because it’s so crazy. Budget for the film was reported to be $750,000 and it returned at the worldwide box office $522 million. $263 (million) of that was domestic.

And notably, box office earnings went up in the second and third weeks once it was in the theaters, which really is an indicator of the marketing working and continuing to work.

Katie: And getting people to talk and to your point, the FOMO of like, “Oh my God, somebody saw this. Now I want to see it.”

Jennimai: Exactly.

Kelsey: Yeah. Something I really liked about the marketing here too is that there’s a sort of key plot element, which is a One Wish Willow. It’s like a little you wish on something and then of course you know…

Jennimai: You should be careful what you wish for!

Kelsey: Be Careful what you wish for ultimately.

Jennimai: A classic trope, but modernized.

Kelsey: Yes. And so you could actually buy one for purchase, which again, I think is one of these ways to encourage people to be a part of it and that also there were some creative partnerships and UGC seeding this actual product.

Again, it’s sort of like a low lift, but it gets people invested in pretending that this is real and that this is this movie, that the things that happened in this movie could happen in real life too.

And I think, again, that’s so key here, but getting people really invested in the universe.

Jennimai: Yeah. I think perhaps I’m biased because I actually really enjoyed this film, but I think the way that they did the One Wish Willow in the film and then bringing it to real life actually feels similar to Blair Witch to me where it felt the most believable because if you haven’t seen the film, The One Wish Willow is kind of portrayed as a old toy, 80s era device that was believed to work.

And the way that they brought it to the real world kind of existed in that same like, “Oh, look at this nostalgic thing that you can get your hands on as well.” I know obviously that it’s not real, but there’s a little part…

Katie: Feels kind of like a collector’s item or something?

Jennimai: Yeah. Then I’m like, “Maybe there is magic in here.”

Kelsey: And you’re like, “I should be careful.”

Jennimai: Exactly. I’m watching the little UGC videos of them breaking the willow and I’m like, “Are you sure you wanted to do that?”

Katie: Did you think through how you phrased that?

Jennimai: I’m worried for you.

Another key part of the campaign is they also similarly to Longlegs did billboards and posters that featured a phone number, presented as if Nikki, the main character, the main villain, villain is debatable. Lots of things to get into here.

Katie: I though this Billboard was so fun though, because it started out just saying, “Text me,” with the number. And then as time went on, they added more and more stuff on there that indicated that she was going crazy.

Jennimai: She was being obsessive.

Katie: Yeah. That no one was texting her back. So it tied into what was happening to Nikki in the movie too.

Jennimai: Right. But if you texted, then you could continue interacting with Nikki. I feel like so much of the intrigue here is what is it like to actually be obsessed with by someone who’s demonically obsessive, possessed. Yeah.

And some of her interactions with people who texted included sending links to Spotify playlists that she created or her Letterboxd account. I feel like just those particular areas are so clever because a Letterboxd account is something that a movie fan would be interacting with and getting to know Nikki as a character through Letterboxd really adds another layer of emotional connection to it.

So just identifying real world places that people do use like Spotify or Letterboxd, but adding your dimension of character to it, it feels real and it feels interesting and you actually want to be in those places.

Kelsey: And I think a lot of marketers are asking, how can my brand be a character? How can my brand have lore or story and all of those things. I think that this discussion has made me feel very convinced that those things are extremely important because you can’t make a playlist for a brand or a brand character, unless you have a really clear vision on what that is and what would actually feel right.

Because again, we also know that consumers sniff out inauthenticity really quickly and are immediately turned off. I just think it’s so clever and smart.

Again, it just encourages that interactivity. I think that you want audiences to play along and come and be scared with you.

Jennimai: Yeah. The creative is really important. The last thing I want to call out for this campaign is to create that FOMO and event-izing the theater experience—they put out social videos that documented the theater audience’s reactions, kind of similar to the Maika Monroe heartbeat thing of people gasping and people feeling squeamish. You watch this video on your phone, you’re like…

Katie: What are they reacting to?

Jennimai: Exactly. I want to experience that exact thing. And across every type of brand, talking about getting people in the room and wanting to be there is so important. And that is so important to the theater business and experience as well. So I think they did a great job there.

Kelsey: Yeah.

Jennimai: Amazing. Well, that is our entire hall of fame, really an honor, I think, for all of these movies to be included in our personal halls of fame. But I’m curious, do you guys have a personal favorite that we’ve talked about today?

Katie: I really like the Smile campaign. I don’t know. I just thought it was so low budget and so innovative. And I think that’s kind of every marketer’s dream.

Jennimai: Yeah.

Kelsey: Yeah. I love the world-building. I love a website where I can bop around and scare myself before I even see a movie. I think that is why it really works. It encourages you to stay and be invested. And I just think it also hearkens back to a different time of the internet that was a little bit more friendly.

Jennimai: Yeah. We were all a little more pure.

Kelsey: Yeah. So I just think to me, anything that there’s those interactive online elements, I think really, really work for me.

Jennimai: Yeah. I mean, I really like both between Maika Monroe and Obsession, getting people to be like, “Oh, I had to be in the theater to experience this. I love a little FOMO. It gets my butt off the couch ultimately.”

Kelsey: Yeah. Yeah.

Jennimai: Amazing. Well, thanks so much for joining us today. And if you have any thoughts on horror movie marketing or the trends that we discuss here today, leave us a comment or send us an email at mkbw@morningrew.com, which you can also find in the show notes. And we’ll catch you next week.

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