The Scary Side of Marketing

October is just around the corner which means it’s almost time for Halloween. As a Halloween lover and horror movie fan who is always into seeing a unique take on marketing, a new horror film’s recent stunt caught my eye and also creeped me out a bit. If you have tuned into a recent Dodgers or Yankees game, you may have noticed something strange — a crowd member behind home plate sporting a sinister grin.

With this occurrence happening with various actors at baseball games around the country and even on NBC’s Today program, it quickly went viral on social media and had users questioning who or what was behind the scheme. Upon further investigation and a quick scroll through the comments, you will soon find out that this is all part of the marketing campaign behind the 2022 horror movie, Smile.

The movie follows Dr. Rose Cotter, who begins to have frightening and unexplainable experiences following a traumatic experience with a patient. As terror follows Cotter, usually in the form of creepy people smiling, she must confront her past in order to get away from the horrors that she is facing.

Smile isn’t the first horror movie to take its marketing to the next level. Hereditary gave out dolls and heart monitors to fans seeing the movie at midnight upon release. IT in 2016 drummed up so much support from fans that they did the marketing for the production themselves by tying red balloons to sewer grates in cities around the country. However, The Blair Witch Project set the standard for next-level horror movie marketing in 1999 by giving away fake missing persons pamphlets in public, planting seeds about the movie in chat rooms and message boards across the Internet and even publishing fake stories in local newspapers on missing people.

Does this type of marketing make you want to see a movie like Smile? I would say yes, but as a horror movie lover I had already purchased my early screening tickets.