Analysis of Marketing Campaign for Movie of Horror-Mystery Genre (Insidious) - 10/09/2011

It is important that I research a marketing campaign for the same movie genre as our intended movie in order to see how the marketing team keep the synergy from the trailer, to the film magazine front cover to the posters. The film 'Insidious' belongs to the horror-mystery genre that we have chosen (shown in the 'Genre Choice' blog), and this is the trailer for it:

I will analyse this trailer more thoroughly in my next blog, but it clearly links to the following film magazine front cover:

When searching for a well-known film magazine front cover advertising Insidious on Google, I realised that big magazines like Empire and Total Film did not seem to advertise horror films on their front covers - they only showed big blockbusters like Inception and Avatar. This is probably because Empire and Total Film want to appeal to the widest audience possible, and going for a horror-orientated film like Insidious would loose a significant amount of viewers and proffit for the magazine. The only magazine cover I could find advertising Insidious was this Fangoria one - a relatively unknown American magazine that isn't even sold in British shops! But despite this, the cover clearly links to the trailer through the common use of 'INSIDIOUS' font and the frightening woman with the black veil that runs at the camera at the end of the trailer.

These are two of the posters I found relating to the Insidious marketing campaign:



In the trailer and these two posters, they market the film on the basis that it was made by "the makers and producers of Paranormal Activity and Saw". This would be appealing for a horror-fanatic audience since these are two of the most successful films to spring from this genre. The first poster is again connected through the dark veiled woman, who is seen also holding the candle on the front cover and running at the camera in the trailer. However, the font in this first poster seems completely unconnected to the rest of the marketing campaign - it is a completely different font to the font used in the second poster, front cover and trailer! This is one of the flaws which makes the campaign somewhat disjointed. Another feature which I feels gives the campaign a major flaw is the tagline - in the trailer and second poster, the tagline "It's not the house that's haunted" is clarified (we hear the elderly woman stating it near the end of the trailer) and we infer from this that it is the tagline. However, on the first poster it says "THE FURTHER YOU TRAVEL, THE DARKER IT GETS" and in my opinion, causes a confusion as to what the tagline actually is. Apart from these two flaws, I feel that this marketing campaign is quite successful - the best success comes from the trailer which seen by itself, would make anyone want to see the film.