Movie News

Violent film ad pulled from Facebook

Wed 27 Feb 12:50 PM

An online ad campaign for thriller Untraceable has been pulled from websites Facebook and Seesmic over its violent content.

The film, which is out this Friday (talk about free publicity), sees an FBI agent played by Diane Lane tracking a serial killer who tortures victims on his website killwithme.com.

Marketing company Picture Production Company used the film's website as a page on popular social networking site Facebook. Once logged onto the page, which was launched five days ago, members could see a violent torture scene from the film being played out.

The following text was written below the scenes, "This guy is going to die. You want to see his stinking flesh burn and bleed and blacken? Until he's some twisted dead thing? This is what you want. And I've filmed it especially for you. The more fans I get, the more I'll show ... ."

The agency's marketing strategy for video community Seesmic was even more controversial. The stunt saw an actor posing as a normal user on a web cam before he disappeared and was then shown again being bound, gagged and seemingly executed. (We've come a long way from a gravel voiced man on trailers telling us what to watch haven't we?)

Dan Light, head of interactive at the marketing company admitted that they had expected the ads to be pulled from the sites. But insists it wasn't a matter of getting publicity (of course not), but it was in fact a experiment on seeing what is acceptable on the internet.

"There's that interesting question of whether people are desensitised to things on screen," Light said. "They will watch these things, but won't say they watched them."