For Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema's horror epic Weapons, we were tasked with developing a cryptic, breadcrumb-led campaign that would build intrigue, stoke curiosity, and drive audiences to experience the horror event of the summer first-hand in theaters.
How do you talk about a movie you can't talk about?
From the announcement of its record-breaking script sale, Zach Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian was the most mysterious and buzzed about film in Hollywood. Having seen how the horror epic unfolds, we knew we wanted audiences going into this film as fresh as possible, to experience the joys of discovering the story’s twists and turns themselves. We were faced with a challenge: build real cultural momentum behind Weapons without revealing any plot details.
Our solution was a bread-crumb approach that treated secrecy as the primary creative device. Rather than explain or reveal, we would craft a mysterious vibe-setting campaign that immersed audiences in an atmosphere of escalating dread; teasing a dark mystery and the sense that something even darker lay ahead.
To do this, we developed a north star to guide our approach: “There’s something wrong in Maybrook.” This simple line allowed us to speak to the horrors descending upon a small town without naming protagonists, motives, or plot beats.
We launched the social campaign with a series of ominous images paired with cryptic copy that hinted at the film’s premise and tone.
To fuel speculation and drive earned media ahead of the official trailer release, we crafted a two hour and seventeen minute unlisted YouTube video compiled from neighborhood surveillance footage of children running into darkness.
After the success of the buildup to and release of the first trailer, we needed to keep social conversation high without revealing more footage or plot details. Great horror is not built solely on shocking scenes and jump scares, audiences need to relate to characters, to see themselves within the terror. To establish this emotional connection, we sought to place viewers in the same position as the town’s residents: overwhelmed by the mystery and dread, desperately seeking answers.
To evoke the anxiety of a parent whose child has vanished, we created a piece inspired by classic local news PSAs.
But how would a child respond to the events unfolding in Maybrook? We set out to explore how the only child remaining, Alex, might process the horrors overtaking the town. Since children often process trauma through art, we created a series of unsettling children's drawings that hinted at the film’s events without explicitly showing them.
Both approaches proved so effective that they grew beyond digital and were adapted into out-of-home activations.
At each touchpoint we deepened the tension, driving organic conversation while preserving the mystery. We aimed to hint at the film’s witchy vibes and the grotesque violence without revealing the source of the terror. Visually, we drew from occult geometry, using type to form elemental shapes that evoked esoteric ritualism, paired with deliberately oblique cropping that balanced unsettling close-ups with cinematic stills.
The result was a campaign that embraced an unsettling ambiguity, teasing fans with the ever present dread of horrors yet to come, whether in the stillness of an empty classroom or the frantic rush of the unstoppable possessed.
Since the objective was building excitement for a film that could not rely on plot-driven promotion, success meant driving sustained conversation while revealing almost nothing. By leveraging secrecy as the creative engine, the campaign exceeded that goal and established a distinct identity for Weapons.
The surveillance video triggered immediate earned media and became a hotbed of fan theories across Reddit, TikTok, and X. Each new breadcrumb, from eerie image drops to the local news PSA to the children’s drawings that later appeared out of home, sparked fresh waves of speculation and praise for the campaign’s restraint and originality.
This energy carried into release. Weapons debuted at number one at the domestic box office with a strong opening weekend that outperformed projections and confirmed that audiences arrived curious, invested, and eager to uncover the truth for themselves.
