The Black Phone Resurrects A Golden Age Of Horror Marketing

gamerant.com:

Movie trailers are always a hard balance to walk, enticing a potential audience into the theater without giving too much away is difficult and confusing. Everyone can probably name a film that got it wrong or a trailer that brought them from complete unawareness of a project to excitedly pre-ordering a ticket.

Scott Derrickson's new horror film The Black Phone is a throwback in many ways, but instead of blandly borrowing notes from older horror cinema, it revives those techniques with clever filmmaking. One of the most interesting ways in which it evokes horror cinema of the previous era is its use of crowd reactions in its trailers.

8 Scariest Moments In The Black Phone

Remember the first trailer for Paranormal Activity? The year was 2009 and horror classics such as Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell and Jaume Collet-Serra's Orphan were making their mark. Paranormal Activity had a slightly strange path to the big screen. It was originally screened in 2007 at a few film festivals, but the film was swiftly acquired by Paramount, who added a new ending and re-released it two years later. The initial 2009 screening only covered a few theaters, but that was part of the gimmick. When it came time to show off the film for wide-release audiences, the brilliant marketing team decided to keep images from the film to a minimum and focus instead on the audience. That simple choice is a huge part of why that simple film is the most profitable horror movie ever made.

The iconic green night-vision-tinted footage of a shocked crowd laid the groundwork for tons of other films. While Paranormal Activity popularized the concept, it was far from the first to use audience reaction to sell a horror film. It's a gimmick, but it's a good gimmick. The