10 Horror Movies That Were Victims Of Bad Marketing | ScreenRant – Screen Rant

It's tough to advertise a horror movie without giving away too much of the plot, but give away too little, and audiences may feel tricked.

The entire point of a movie is to get people to watch it. Some movies earn small but devoted followings, and that's OK. Other movies aim for massive crowds and wide adoration, and that's OK, too. But one thing that these two disparate ideologies have in common is marketing. A movie needs marketing to be seen, and how a movie is marketed greatly influences what audiences expect from it. Market an artsy film in an artsy way, and you throw off the mainstream audience. Intentionally mislead the mainstream through marketing, and you risk a lot of negative viewer reviews.These are ten horror movies that were victims of bad marketing.

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Annihilation is a brilliant horror movie that blends slow, melodic storytelling with thought-provoking concepts, an abstract story, and some heavy themes. Yes, it does contain alien elements, but it's not an Alien movie. You wouldn't know that from the trailers, which marketed the movie as an alien-monster movie hybrid with mutated animals, freaky skull bears, and insane people. People expected a monster movie, not a dreamlike meditation on grief and self-destruction.

While A24 films are generally enjoyed by mainstream audiences, It Comes at Night is an exception, and it largely has to do with the movie's marketing. The trailers marketed It Comes at Night as a monster flick in the vein of A Quiet Place. Characters spoke of "things out there," and the marketing greatly pushed the image of a dog looking into the darkened woods.

But the movie wasn't interested in monsters or anything of the sort. It was mostly a slow exploration of paranoia and insanity, and there wasn't a single monster to be found.

Mother! is a really weird film from director Darren Aronofsky. On the surface, it's about a young couple who are intruded upon by a massive group of strangers. But the movie is largely allegorical,both from a Biblical and naturalistic point of view. It's also very unpleasant to watch, as it's full of anxiety, grotesque images, and lots of close-up shots. Of course, the movie's marketing mainly focused on thesuperficial story and failed to explore its allegorical underpinnings.

Many people were disappointed with the more philosophical underpinnings of Prometheus and wanted a more straightforward Alienstory of old.

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The marketing for Alien: Covenant seemed to promise just such a return with trailers emphasizing the movie's horror elements and the posters putting the famous Xenomorph front and center. What they didn't tell you was that the movie was very much a philosophical sequel to Prometheus and that the promised alien action didn't occur until the final act.

Those who have seen the film will know that the titular witch is a rather insignificant aspect of the story and maybe gets around thirty seconds of screen time. The rest of the movie largely depicts the tragic downfall of a paranoid Puritan family who are gripped with superstitious beliefs. But the trailers are crafted like those of It Comes at Night, with lots of foreboding forests and promises of supernatural spooks. It makes it seem like the witch is a far moreprominent figure than she actually is.

This may be a rare case of trailers making the movie even better. The trailers for Hereditary made it seem like a relatively run-of-the-mill story about grief and ghosts both metaphorical and literal. It made Annie's mother's death seem far more important than it actually was, and it made Charlie seem like some creepy girl who was going to bring horrorand destruction to her family. She does do that, but in a very surprising and unpredictable way...

It's genuinely hard to market The Cabin in the Woods. This is a very clever and meta Drew Goddard/Joss Whedon spin on the typical slasher movie, complete with a twist that completely upends the storyandmeta-textually acknowledging longstandinghorror movie tropes.

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Of course, you can't spoil the movie in the trailers. So, while they briefly hinted at a "controlling figure," the trailers mostly depicted the movie as just another horror comedy set in a cabin... with a twist! It was that, but it was also so much more.

Crimson Peak is Guillermo del Toro's attempt at a Gothic Victorian story, and, like most Gothic Victorian stories, it involves a haunted house. However, the story isn't about the haunted house. Really, it's mainly a period dramathat takes place in a haunted houseand, even then, the titular mansion doesn't appear until the movie's second act. There's a difference between a ghost story and a period drama with horror elements, but that didn't stop the trailers from making the movie look likeThe Conjuring.

Event Horizon is a creepy Lovecraftian film about the unknown horrors of deep space and the borders of our universe. It veers so far into horror territory that many people have criticized it for its over-reliance on clichs. However, the trailers make it seem more like an action-thriller that takes place on a malevolent spaceship. People were expecting a creepy StarTrek, and they got a delirious descent into horror.

Arachnophobia is a dark horror comedy, but the trailer makes it seem far funnier and more lighthearted than it actually is. The trailer makes it seem more comedic than scary, complete with a lighthearted orchestral score, Jeff Daniels being the funny dad who hates spiders, and John Goodman being the kooky exterminator. T

here arebrief scenes of spiders, but they are mostly played for comedy. What it didn't depict, however, was the constant sense of dread, the grotesque imagery, and the grisly deaths. A wacky comedy this was not.

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10 Horror Movies That Were Victims Of Bad Marketing | ScreenRant - Screen Rant

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero