Viral movies, From The Blair Witch Project to Cloverfield

The pioneer was “The Blair Witch Project”, a low budget movie, filmed in digital and made by a couple of American students. The release of the film on July 16, 1999 cam after months of publicity, including a ground-breaking campaign by the studio to use the Internet and suggest that the film was a real event. The movie is the story of three young student filmmakers who get lost in the woods while filming a documentary about the eponymous local legend. After being terrorized by an unseen presence for several days, they mysteriously disappear. Neither the students nor their bodies are ever found, although their video and sound equipment (along with most of the footage they shot) is eventually recovered, several feet under a building foundation that was laid at least a century earlier. At the time, the web was still developing, and the average internet audience was less used to subtle marketing strategies. More naïve, less suspicious. As a result, a lot of people believed the story, believed (or wanted to believe) in the witch in the authenticity of the footage.

The movie, thanks to that original way of promoting, gathered the attention of conventional media too, creating more and more buzz. The result was a profit of around 300 mil $, in front of a total cost of less than 3 mil. Even with the exponential growth of internet following this movie, Hollywood didn’t seem too interested in pursuing these strategies for half a decade.

After 8 years, and a few unsuccessful projects, like “Snakes on the Plane”, the creator of “Lost”, JJ Abrahams, created a huge buzz around the upcoming horror/ catastrophe movie, “Cloverfield”. The first trailer is showing something (the what is not clear) destroying the city of New York, decapitating the Statue of Liberty and playing with buildings in a “Godzillesque” way. Everything is filmed by a mobile phone, same idea but technologically more evolved than “The Blair Witch Project”.

Around the movie, marketers created a whole world of websites and online communities, constantly spreading rumors. A website of a fictive Japanese company called Tagruato (specialized in oceanic drillings), suggests but does not reveal where the “thing” destroying NY is coming from. Other website are suspected to be involved in the viral campaign too. This created a huge hype, hundreds of theories about the plot, and pushed the communities to investigate more and more hints. “Cloverfield” is one of the most “blogged” words online.

In my opinion the whole campaign is perfectly made to create the hype about a movie we don’t know anything about. The less you know, the more confusing it gets, the more you want to know, and the more you want to see how it will end. What do you think? Is this way of promoting applicable only to this kind of low-cost movies or is it going to be a major “blockbuster” trend?