Is horror entering a new age of promotional worldbuilding with WEAPONS and Longlegs?

Before The Blair Witch Project premiered in cinemas back in 1999, a 44-minute long mockumentary titled Curse of the Blair Witch aired on the Sci-Fi Channel earlier that year. It was a fairly robust primer on the myth of the titular witch and how it could be connected to the disappearance of the three missing students the movie centers on. It looked at the history of the area, how witchcraft fit into it, and the 1940 case of serial killer Rustin Parr and the Burkittsville 7 (the kids Parr was accused of killing under the influence of the witch). It was terrifying. As a 12-year-old kid back then, I was completely absorbed by it, to the point of believing it to be real. Of course, this was before the internet exploded and spoilers ruined most everything.

It was a promotional strategy, sure, but it had an additional effect as well: worldbuilding. It did a lot of it, and those who saw Curse beforehand got a much richer and terrifying experience out of the actual film. Coupled with the missing students posters that Artisan Entertainment (the film’s distributor) created along with the fake police reports and the website, it was all just too convincing to be fake at a time where access to entertainment news and actor profiles wasn’t as widespread.

Would a mockumentary disguised as a real documentary work today? I don’t think so. Despite our current relationship with the truth and the rise of fake news as a concept, we’re still less willing to entertain the veracity of a horror movie, no matter how well we dress it up in the “truth.” We’re more inclined to believe that a pedophile ring operates beneath a pizza parlor than a witch roams the woods looking for pet serial killers (though you’ll still find a few that do).

In this context, though, we can see how movies like Oz Perkins’ Longlegs and the upcoming Weapons (directed by Zach Cregger, the mind behind Barbarian) are finding other ways to use promotional content as a worldbuilding tool to drive up excitement for their releases. Rather than trying to fool audiences into thinking their movies are “real,” they’re using these tactics to expand on the story with faux news sites that contain carefully chosen details that can get curious parties started on their theories early.

The most recent example of it is Weapons. Before the release of its first official trailer, a link that led to a news site called “Maybrook News” started circulating. It offered an article and several short videos documenting the disappearance of a group of 3^rd graders who at 2:17am left their houses and ran into the night.

Immediately, we’re presented with what appears to be the central mystery of the story, which essentially kickstarts discussions on why these kids ran away in the first place. The videos alone lend an air of authenticity that help set a very sinister tone from the get-go, and things can only get darker once we know more.

After the trailer dropped, another article is published. This one expands on the newly revealed main character, a teacher called Ms. Gandy. She teaches the kids that vanished, which is explained in the trailer, but there’s an additional detail in the Maybrook News article that complicates things. Gandy is a transfer hire. An incident in her previous school prompted the change. Does this somehow tie to disappearances?

The doors that this sliver of information open can extend the movie’s public lifespan. Suddenly, Weapons becomes a more complex storytelling experience that lives beyond its runtime. Add to this that a different article found on the site suggests the movie exists within the same universe as Barbarian and a new path for exploration appears right before the reader.

Longlegs went this route just last year and it also proved fruitful. Its worldbuilding promo included a very 90’s-looking website that contained reports about the families the titular serial killer murdered, complete with a strange voice recording of Longlegs himself. Along with the cryptic nature of the trailers, this let audiences indulge their morbid curiosity with crime scene photos and other disturbing imagery. It gave the killer an even more unsettling presence because readers could bring all this to the movie theater for their first viewing.

The stroke of genius in the Longlegs campaign, though, was the phone number people could call to hear a message from the killer. It was short but haunting, and it was all the more chilling due to the production’s decision to keep the killer’s look under wraps. It all tied to the overarching satanic feel the movie was aiming for. It colored the ritualistic quality of the crimes and the person responsible for them in a darker tone that it already had, affecting even our appreciation of the pagan-looking symbols that were used to create the movie’s title and some of the other promo.

Again, this marketing strategy led to an experience that transcended the movie screen. It made detectives out of fans and led to a series of articles from different outlets (including this one) that kept the movie on people’s lips. It was hard not to have Longlegs worming its way through your mind well before it premiered. Ultimately, it made the movie scarier.

Weapons and Longlegs separate themselves from other attempts at creative marketing by tying their viral content to their stories. They didn’t go the TikTok dance route, or for traditional movie merchandise. They found their secret ingredient in worldbuilding. There’s nothing wrong with generating buzz through dances or memes. Whatever gets more eyes on your product the better (just look at M3gan). It’s just that the two movies mentioned here went, and are going about it, in a way that enriches the movie-going experience at a narrative level. That’s special. Should future horror movies follow suit, a new golden age of promotional worldbuilding awaits.