Yahoo Movies How The Blair Witch Project inspired Longlegs to box office glory
Longlegs is celebrating an amazing opening weekend at the box office, and that's down to a marketing campaign inspired by a 25-year-old classic.
Longlegs is a bona fide box office success story already. The Nicolas Cage-starring horror movie earned $22.6m (£17.4m) from its opening weekend, easily beating the expensive romcom Fly Me to the Moon — starring Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum. Naturally, both movies lost out to the minions, but we all saw that coming.
It's fair to say that Longlegs has been building hype brilliantly over the last few months with the help of one of the smartest viral marketing campaigns in decades. That marketing has now paid off handsomely, with studio Neon already making enough cash to be in profit on the movie — assuming the usual rule that a film has to earn double its budget to be in the black.
But this playbook is nothing new. In fact, it harks back to a movie that is celebrating its 25th anniversary this week. A movie that set the tone for viral marketing as a concept: The Blair Witch Project.
The world first learned about The Blair Witch Project in the summer of 1998 when its official website arrived online. In keeping with the film itself, the website framed the story as being completely true, selling this through newsreel interviews and articles about the legend of the Blair Witch. Nowadays, you'd have millions of news articles unpicking every falsehood but, back then, this was catnip to the burgeoning online community of message boards and forums.
Read more: How The Blair Witch Project got audiences to wonder, 'Is this real?' (Yahoo Entertainment)
This was a relatively novel way to market a movie in the 90s as studios tried to work out how best to leverage the increasing ubiquity of the web.
Even in terms of trailers, things were played more subtly than they would be now. A trailer was first leaked on the movie fan website Ain't It Cool News and also played on college campuses. Then, the studio leveraged the popularity of the first Star Wars prequel, showing an enigmatic 40-second clip before screenings of one of the biggest movies of the year. This directed even more people to the viral marketing behind the legend.
All of these tricks fed into the way Longlegs was sold to audiences. Just like with The Blair Witch Project, Neon allowed horror fans to feel like they were "discovering" Longlegs by themselves. The enigmatic clips posted on YouTube didn't even use the film's title at first, building a creepy story inspired by the iconography of true crime.
Read more: Longlegs director reveals meaning behind movie’s ending (The Independent)
Just like with Blair Witch, the clips were more about tone and terror than they were about unveiling the movie's actual plot. This opened the door for something that didn't exist for The Blair Witch Project back in 1999 — TikTok.
Longlegs has been a huge deal on TikTok for the last few months, with creators pulling together the various clips and teasers to tell the story of the marketing campaign as a whole. This was impactful in 2024 because it's just so uncommon for audiences to go into a film without knowing everything about it.
Watch: Longlegs trailer featuring a creepy 911 call
Longlegs didn't try to pass itself off as real in the way that Blair Witch did, but it pulled off many of the same enigmatic tricks. It concealed the plot from potential audiences, while using the internet to build organic buzz. The studio has already been proved successful in this pursuit, with Neon achieving its highest US box office opening weekend ever.
Read more: People Are Just Realising How New Horror Movie Longlegs Is Connected To This Classic Rom-Com (HuffPost)
Horror movies often have to work harder than most in order to get seen through the noise. Blockbuster horrors like A Quiet Place: Day One and MaXXXine have big studio backing, but others have to find a way to stand out through the genre slop in cinemas and the enormous quantities of scary material — both good and terrible — on streaming services.
Longlegs has managed to do that, and it certainly has the techniques of a 25-year-old horror classic to thank for it.
Longlegs is out now in cinemas.
