Weapons creates a horror campaign you participate in

Warner Bros sets a trap with a one-time-only livestream

On June 23 at 12:00PM ET, Warner Bros will air a single broadcast from MaybrookMissing.com. There’s no trailer, runtime or promise of behind-the-scenes content or star cameos. Just a warning: “It won’t be explained, only experienced.”

This is horror marketing turned psychological where the lack of information is the hook. By announcing an experience you can’t rewatch, rewind, or contextualize, Weapons builds urgency and dread in equal measure. If you don’t tune in, you might miss something horrifying. And if you do? You have no idea what to expect.

It’s a bold approach that recalls the eventized strategies used by films like The Black Phone, where fans were led into “fear rooms” and found footage booths ahead of release moments designed not to inform, but to unsettle. The June 23 livestream, if successful, could do more than raise awareness. It could change the energy around the film.

The teaser site blurs fiction and fact with haunting precision

The heart of the campaign is MaybrookMissing.net, a fictional news blog written as if a small-town journalist were desperately trying to make sense of a local tragedy. The site chronicles the disappearance of 17 children all of whom walked out of their homes in unison at 2:17AM.

It’s not styled like a typical movie website. There’s no overt branding. Just lo-fi photos, public records, personal testimonies, and conflicting updates. The storytelling is subtle and fractured, like something found on a conspiracy forum or early 2000s Reddit thread. Fans quickly discovered that some images refresh with new clues. Others appear to flicker based on the time of day. There are references to underground tunnels. Morse code patterns in streetlights. A photo of a youth baseball team that subtly shifts positions every time you visit.

What Warner Bros and Cregger have built is more than viral marketing. It’s a fictional world that mimics internet culture and rewards obsession. And that’s why Reddit, TikTok, and horror forums are so eager to dig in.

Found footage replaces traditional trailers and invites discomfort

Rather than release a slick trailer filled with scares and exposition, the studio opted to upload over two hours of unlisted, uncut “security cam” footage. The video, which emerged online in mid-June, shows what appears to be the actual night the children disappeared. We watch from static angles as they quietly leave their homes one by one, no soundtrack, no editing, just the soft hum of nighttime suburban dread.

The footage has no clear arc, but viewers online began noting oddities. At 2:14:09, there’s a flash in a second-story window. Some say it looks like a figure. Others argue it’s a reflection. Nobody agrees. That’s the point.

This approach mirrors the realism-first strategy used in the release of Host (2020), which also embraced lo-fi digital footage and placed the horror in mundane, digital spaces. That film, made entirely over Zoom during the pandemic, turned low production value into a virtue and earned a massive return on investment just $100K to produce, $443K earned, and a franchise deal in the works. Weapons is using a similar language of unease: don’t show more, show less and make the audience watch closer.

How this compares to other horror campaigns

Every piece of this campaign feels like a riddle: the livestream with no details, the site that feels too real, the video that never explains itself. It doesn’t feel like a pre-release campaign. It feels like a story already in progress.

That’s a radically different approach in a landscape dominated by algorithm-optimized marketing. Most horror films hit audiences with polished teasers, voiceover-heavy trailers, and media interviews that explain the mythology up front. Weapons trusts its audience to show up and figure it out for themselves and to enjoy the confusion along the way.

Key aspects of why it works so well:

• It creates lore instead of marketing. Everything feels like it belongs in the world of the film, not in a commercial.

• It’s low-budget, high-intrigue. A website, a YouTube link, and a well-timed stream cost less than a Times Square billboard but can drive more sustained engagement.

• It encourages obsessive behavior. Fans are piecing it together one screenshot, one photo refresh, one Reddit theory at a time.

• It treats the audience like collaborators. Instead of handing them a story, it asks them to help uncover it.

• It builds emotional buy-in before release. If you’ve spent an hour decoding a photo or watching grainy footage, you’re much more likely to buy a ticket.

More experiential horror campaigns that turned mystery into momentum

Here’s how Weapons stacks up against other recent horror films that embraced immersive, off-screen storytelling to drive buzz and box office.

Each leaned into world-building, discomfort, or viral intrigue rather than traditional advertising.

Movie marketing intel: This week in trends

AI-POWERED CONTENT CREATION 🎥 Will AI kill TV or make it smarter? Media execs share 5 key ways the industry is transforming (Axios)
Media leaders at Tubi, YouTube, and A+E highlight how AI is transforming the entertainment ecosystem by enabling personalized trailers, mood-based discovery, and automated localization. For film marketers, this unlocks the ability to generate multiple creative variations in minutes including custom cutdowns, emotional tone shifts, and even genre-tailored edits. The key is marrying AI-driven efficiency with human storytelling to ensure authenticity and emotional impact. Studios can now scale global campaigns faster without losing narrative nuance.

PRE-SHOW ADS 🍿 AMC introduces premium pre-show ads (New York Times)
AMC is rolling out “platinum spot” ads before movie trailers joining Regal and Cinemark in monetizing early audience attention. For studios, this means a new way to dominate the big screen beyond traditional trailers. These full-screen, sound-rich spots offer a premium canvas for event films and tailored narratives, especially when paired with genre-specific screenings. Marketers should treat these pre-show ads as strategic extensions of their trailer strategy, using them to reinforce emotion, intrigue, or cast appeal right before the feature starts.