Weapons (2025): Success in Marketing Horror Using Social Media (Jonathan Castella's Blog Post #3)

 Social media has proved itself to be a powerful tool for corporations and brands to advertise themselves and make them a part of our everyday life. Social media is clearly very effective in this regard, but are there any other ways in which social media is used to help advertise other products? Absolutely,  social media is a fantastic tool for advertising, especially horror movies. A successful example of this is with the recent horror film from earlier this year Weapons directed by Zach Cregger. For the purpose of familiarity I will focus on Weapons marketing primarily in relation to social media platform Instagram. The marketing began on April 14th of this year with the posting of five separate images with the caption “And they never came back…” The first of these images was a digital clock with the time 2:17. The second was a grainy photo of an open front door. The third was another grain photo of a group of kids who appear to be part of a baseball team along with their coach. The fourth appeared to be  the point of view of a doorbell camera looking out onto a suburban street. The final was of a child running alone at night on the road. These images imminently captured the attention of horror fans, even those not familiar with Zach Creggar's previous work. This was due in part to the posts also being shared on the official Instagram accounts of  New Line Cinema, Warner Brothers and Bloody Disgusting, which is a multimedia horror entertainment company. This got users discussing what this movie was and what it could be about. The combination of the creepy imagery and the ominous captain “And they never came back…” really captured the minds of its targeted  audience. Since its release Weapons has grossed over $250,000 in the global box office making it one of the highest grossing horror films of all time. Thanks to its fantastic and effective marketing utilizing social media, Weapons
guaranteed itself success. 

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