How shocking and cryptic horror movie marketing is breaking all the rules

Horror is one of the safest bets at the box office. You don't always need a franchise and you don't need big stars. The promise of scares is enough. But, as a result, cinemas are flooded with these films, which means that horror movie marketing sometimes has a very tough task to get noticed. That's why, in recent years, we've seen some really fascinating efforts that have up-ended traditional expectations of how to sell a film.

Currently, the US distributor Neon is working overtime to promote its blood-soaked Stephen King adaptation The Monkey. The film has a lot in its locker from a marketing standpoint anyway with the King connection and the presence of director Osgood Perkins, who directed last year's buzzy serial killer tale Longlegs.

But despite this, Neon has still unleashed a fascinating and boundary-pushing marketing campaign, which is focusing in hard on the violent spectacle of the movie. Ahead of the first trailer in January 2024, Neon shared a report on X (formerly Twitter) from the Motion Picture Association discussing the various classification issues around the violent preview.

This desire to highlight the extent to which the movie's violence goes continued with a poster released just a week or two later. The poster showcased a bloodied knife along with a lengthy caption talking how the movie is "chock-full of bloody violence and death". The caption also lists some of the "instruments of death" used in the film, including a harpoon gun, a lawnmower, and a stampede of wild horses.

Read more: The Monkey, Osgood Perkins’ Next Pic, Racks Up 109M Views In Trailer Traffic, A Record For Independent Horror Film (Deadline, 2 min read)

Hilariously, the caption concludes by stating "you can enjoy death with your friends and loved ones in the comfort of your favourite movie theatre". This sort of irreverence is working overtime to position The Monkey as the sort of fun, extreme horror film that is great fun to experience in the cinema. Neon once again doubled down on this by tweeting supposed exchanges between the marketing team and the major TV networks about airing the violent trailer.

This style of marketing is fascinating, given its willingness to spoil the most brutal moments from the movie in advance. Neon knows full well that a film like this needs buzz, and one way to create that buzz is by selling the film as something more violent than you've ever seen before. If a horror film tells you it's going to kill someone with a lawnmower, you want to see it happen.

This sort of unusual marketing also came across in Perkins' last film. Longlegs had one of the most unconventional and intelligent campaigns of recent years behind it, inspired by The Blair Witch Project and its pioneering viral marketing approach. It takes a lot of bravery to have an unhinged Nicolas Cage performance at the centre of your movie and then just not show it in any of the trailers.

Read more: How The Blair Witch Project inspired Longlegs to box office glory (Yahoo Entertainment, 4 min read)

But the marketing behind Longlegs was even cleverer than that. Rather than a selection of showy trailers, Longlegs marketed itself with a breadcrumb trail of shorter clips — many of which didn't even use the movie's title — to build attention, teasing different parts of the serial killer mythology. Audience members turned detective, piecing story and visual elements together in blog posts and TikTok videos.

By the time a longer trailer for Longlegs emerged — still with Cage hidden — there was a real cult following behind the movie. That was enhanced by further flourishes to the campaign, including a genius trailer that used Maika Monroe's heartbeat when confronted by Cage in character to showcase just how terrifying he was.

This unique approach certainly worked for Longlegs, which was able to ride that marketing campaign to $127m (£102m) at the worldwide box office. For a film that cost less than $10m (£8m), that's a very impressive return. It's no wonder that Perkins' next movie also has some intriguing and unconventional marketing ideas behind it.

Read more: Smile 2 director thinks horror franchise can explore 'different kinds of diverse stories' (BANG Showbiz, 2 min read)

But it's not just Perkins and his oeuvre that is showing how horror movie marketing can push the envelope. In 2022, Parker Finn's Smile became one of the genre's biggest box office wins of the decade, earning $217m (£174m) globally. Part of that was due to its excellent trailer and the impressive simplicity of its concept, but the movie also had a really fun marketing campaign.

At a series of sporting events — including a handful of baseball games — prior to the film's release, the marketing team bought seats in spaces that would prominently appear in the view of TV cameras. They tasked actors with sitting in these seats and performing the movie's signature, chilling grin.

This stunt earned the movie a lot of mainstream publicity and got sport fans as well as movie fans talking about it on social media. It's rare that a film's marketing campaign genuinely spills over into the real world, so this was something very special. It would be wrong to put the film's success — and that of its 2024 sequel — entirely in the corner of this marketing, but it certainly raised awareness of the movie and got it in front of eyeballs who wouldn't otherwise have known about it.

Read more: Stephen King's 'The Monkey' review on Threads is pretty unambiguous (Mashable, 1 min read)

And for horror, that's often half the battle. With such a crowded genre — especially in the era of streaming services — studios have to do interesting and different things to stand out from the masses and masses of other spooky films on offer.

The Monkey is the latest movie to benefit from all of this, sticking out from the crowd with a marketing campaign that has made a virtue of its excessive violence and willingness to talk about that violence with tongue lodged firmly in cheek. Anybody else who has recently made a horror film should take note and come up with a whole new way to stand out. Anyone can show us splatter and severed heads, so there needs to be another dimension.

The Monkey is in UK cinemas from 21 February.