Viral Marketing Campaigns for Horror Movies from the Blair Witch Project (1999) Up to Rings (2017)

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject Communications - Movies and Television, grade: 2,0, University of Bonn, language: English, abstract: In this paper the following horror movies will be analyzed: The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Blair Witch (2016), Paranormal Activity 1 (2007), Cloverfield (2008) and 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016), The Ring Two (2005) and Rings (2017). These movies are being analyzed since their marketing campaigns concerning virality, word of mouth, interactivity and storytelling show many similarities but also some of them bring innovation to the marketing of horror movies. In the viral marketing of horror movies the strategies of storytelling and word of mouth are major factors in order to generate virality and to expand the fictional world consisting of characters and plot both online and offline. How the marketing campaigns of the studios regarding the movies listed above make use of these strategies and how viral marketing of horror movies has changed in terms of interactivity, mediality and storytelling since The Blair Witch Project will be examined in this paper.