Warner Bros has created a website to promote director Zach Cregger’s new horror, Weapons, and hints at a connection to his debut, Barbarian.
Having had its release date moved forward, director Zach Cregger’s next film, Weapons, is now due for release this August. With a date set, it looks as though Warner Bros is quietly beginning the marketing campaign for what sounds like a quite eerie horror thriller. As spotted by World Of Reel, the studio has recently set up a website, titled Maybrook News, which is clearly designed to tease Weapons' premise.
Given the raw look of a pre-Web 2.0 site, Maybrook News currently amounts to two sparse pages, each containing a mock news story. The first describes the case of 17 local children who all spontaneously woke up in their sleepy American town early one morning and vanished.
The second page, found by clicking a link titled, “Underground Prison Discovered in Rental Home,” is a clear reference to Barbarian, Cregger’s first film. Released in 2022, it starred Georgina Campbell as Tess – a 20-something woman who finds something ominous lurking beneath her Detroit Airbnb rental property. Tess is mentioned by name in this faux news story, and it all suggests that Barbarian’s events will be somehow connected to the disappearances described in Weapons.
Visitors at this year’s CinemaCon were shown a trailer for Cregger’s latest film, and write-ups of its contents (like this one over at Variety) all describe the same scenario outlined in Warner’s viral website. An entire class of children go missing at the same time one morning, and the town’s grown-ups are left wondering where they went and who might be responsible.
Featuring Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Benedict Wong and Alden Ehrenreich among its cast, Weapons is said to take in multiple story threads and viewpoints, with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia often used as a reference point. It all sounds much darker than that 1999 drama, though, with Variety writing, “We can’t stress how upsetting some of this footage was.”
As for the Maybrook News site, it has pleasing echoes of The Blair Witch’s viral marketing campaign, also from 1999, which used websites and other media to create one of horror cinema’s most memorable hoaxes. It was an approach that other studios borrowed and ran off with – Paramount’s marketing team created a whole suite of sites to promote Matt Reeves’ monster movie Cloverfield in 2008.
How will Cregger’s new opus connect to the events of Barbarian? We’ll find out when Weapons emerges in UK cinemas from the 8th August. Don’t be surprised if we see more bits of viral marketing emerge in the interim.
