Date of Award

5-2026

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Honors Thesis

First Advisor

Eric Hahn

Second Advisor

Michael Aronson

Abstract

Film marketing has always been a vital part of engaging audiences with motion pictures, particularly for original intellectual property (IP) projects striving to build a passionate fanbase. In the 1950s and 1960s, filmmaking pioneers Alfred Hitchcock and William Castle revolutionized original movie campaigns, laying the foundation for audience engagement through two main, opposite strategies: secrecy for horror and horror-adjacent releases and transparency for non-horror releases. The Blair Witch Project (Sánchez and Myrick, 1999)’s marketing became the defining film campaign of the internet age, drawing upon Hitchcock and Castle’s secretive approaches by pioneering alternate reality games (ARGs). This strategy, which lets audiences feel as though they are discovering the film themselves, has been built upon by subsequent horror and horror-adjacent film campaigns amid the continued growth of the media landscape, most recently for Weapons (Cregger, 2025). Conversely, non-horror marketing for Borat (Charles, 2006) and Marty Supreme (Safdie, 2025) has expanded upon Hitchcock and Castle’s other primary strategy of having directors or actors lead film marketing efforts, as each transparent campaign actively offered ways for the public to interact and become acquainted with its movie’s characters and world. Through both approaches, film marketers aim to accomplish the same overarching goal: emotionally invest audiences and turn them into hands-on advocates of original releases. This outcome is particularly important as the rise of streaming services and oversaturation on social media platforms make it more difficult than ever to attract audiences to movie theaters.

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