It may not be a giant sequel to a company like Deadpool and Wolverine Or Inside Out 2but Long legs is one of the biggest successes of the year. Grossing $74.35 million, it became not only Neon’s highest-grossing film, but also its highest-grossing film. blockbuster independent horror film of the last decade. Not only was the film’s budget under $10 million, but the studio spent less than $10 million on marketing. But it nevertheless triumphed because Neon decided to “respect the horror audience” and chose not to “feed” fans with “the standard, the teaser, the trailer, the poster and the spots television,” the studio’s marketing manager. Christian Parkes explained to The Hollywood Reporter.

Neon’s creative marketing team deployed many clever tricks during its campaign, but the best play was keeping some mystery around Longlegs himself, Nicolas Cage. “Tom (Quinn, founder and CEO of Neon) has said many times that one of the reasons why Jaws is the greatest movie of all time, one of the reasons it works so well is you don’t see the shark,” Parkes explained. “So we thought: let’s not show the shark. Let’s not show Cage. Let’s remember it.

Before hiding his face in marketing materials, the studio “Nic started saying, ‘Am I correct in believing that you’re going to hold back my magnificent grotesque until later in the campaign?'” Parkes said. “You can see him saying it, right?” And I said, “Actually, Nic, we don’t want to show you that at all.” He leaned back in his chair and smiled. And just like that, we knew we were good.

This bet – and many otherslike releasing a Zodiac type advertisement in the San Francisco Timesby renting a billboard with a phone number linked to a creepy message from Longlegs and creating an ad based on one from star Maika Monroe. accelerated heart rate when she first saw Cage in character, it paid off. As THR points out, the campaign is certainly movie (and genre) specific, but it definitely reinforces the fact that people definitely don’t want trailers that tell them every plot point of the movie.