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NEON marketed Longlegs by making the promotion feel like a trail of clues from the film: cryptic teasers, coded ads, unsettling phone messages and a fake true-crime website. The campaign revealed little about the plot and kept Nicolas Cage’s face largely out of view, inviting audiences to wonder what they were seeing before they ever reached the theater.
How the Longlegs campaign worked
Rather than explain the film in a conventional preview, NEON scattered fragments across trailers, advertisements and online material. The Los Angeles Times described the approach as a trail of enigmatic trailers, phone messages, encrypted newspaper ads, fake blog posts and other stunts. The idea was not simply to announce a horror film, but to make finding and interpreting its promotion part of the experience.
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Longlegs [Blu-Ray] | $16.79 | Buy on Amazon |
| 2 |
![Longlegs [4K UHD + Blu-Ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/410arzS6veL._SL160_.jpg)
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Longlegs [4K UHD + Blu-Ray] | $27.05 | Buy on Amazon |
| 3 |
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Longlegs [Blu-ray] | $19.29 | Buy on Amazon |
| 4 |
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Longlegs - Edición España | $31.90 | Buy on Amazon |
Clues across ads, phone calls and the web
- A coded half-page advertisement appeared in the Seattle Times, according to Northeastern Global News.
- Billboards in Los Angeles carried a phone number. Calling it led to whispered threats in Cage’s voice.
- A true-crime-style website presented material about the fictional Birthday Murders.
- Fake blog posts and other cryptic promotional pieces added to the sense that viewers were following a case rather than watching a standard film campaign.
The examples were reported by Northeastern Global News on July 10, 2024. The broader account of the campaign appeared in the Los Angeles Times on July 16, 2024.
Why the trailers hid Nicolas Cage’s face
The campaign withheld two things a typical preview might reveal: substantial plot detail and a clear look at Cage as the killer. The Los Angeles Times reported that NEON had planned a more conventional preview, then changed course after an early cryptic teaser received an enthusiastic audience response. The studio leaned into the uncertainty instead of explaining the character.
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- Longlegs [Blu-Ray]
Monica Koyama, a USC communication management professor and entertainment marketing expert, told the Times that obscuring Cage “increases the intrigue.” The withholding gave audiences a question to carry into the film: what did Longlegs look like, and what was the story behind him?
The Times also reported a promotional audio detail from the filming of Maika Monroe’s first scene with Cage as Longlegs: a microphone attached to Monroe’s chest recorded her heartbeat rising from 76 to 170 beats per minute. That figure was presented as part of the film’s promotion, not as an independent physiological study.
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- Longlegs [4K UHD]
What made the mystery fit the movie
A cryptic campaign can create a curiosity gap: people encounter something strange, want to know what it means, and seek out more clues. Northeastern marketing professor Sean Gallagher said the Longlegs promotion worked in close alignment with the film’s emotional tone. Instead of separating advertising from the horror, it let the unsettling mood begin before the screening and continue afterward through audience conversation.
“It’s about creating the experience,” Gallagher told Northeastern. He described the experience as extending before and during the film, then into the stories people share after leaving the theater. That is a plausible explanation for why the campaign attracted attention; it is not proof that mystery-based promotion works for every film. Gallagher cautioned that this approach is not suited to every movie.
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What the campaign cost and what the film opened to
The Los Angeles Times reported that NEON put the film’s combined production and promotion cost below $10 million. The same report said Longlegs opened with $22.6 million in domestic ticket sales. Those are the figures reported in 2024, and the cost figure is attributed to the studio.
The opening and the campaign happened together, but the cited reporting does not measure how much the marketing independently contributed to ticket sales. The numbers show a striking opening relative to the reported cost; they do not establish that the campaign alone caused it.
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- Longlegs Maika Monroe (Actor), Nicolas Cage (Actor), Osgood Perkins (Director)
Why the strategy is not a template for every film
Withholding information can turn promotion into an invitation to investigate, but it depends on a strong match between the campaign’s mood and the film’s subject. For Longlegs, coded clues and withheld imagery echoed the movie’s horror and mystery. For a film whose appeal depends on clearly communicating its premise, characters or spectacle, the same lack of explanation could leave prospective viewers confused rather than curious.
The campaign’s success as a piece of promotion is easiest to understand as an extension of the film’s atmosphere: it gave people fragments to decode, not a complete account of what they would see. Its box-office result remains a separate outcome, not a measured causal verdict on the marketing.
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