What happens when you market your paranormal movie as something a little too real?
Look, as perhaps the world’s biggest fan of The Blair Witch Project, I am in no way against the notion of using a little immersive marketing to really sell your film. It offers an opportunity to couch your film in a richer world than what can be functionally created in a ninety-minute or so runtime; whether it’s the purported investigation into the unethical practices of a company featured in Cloverfield, a sprawling mystery set against the backdrop of Gotham City for The Dark Knight, or the more recent “dark web” footage connected to events in Bring Her Back, there’s a lot to be said for this kind of guerrilla marketing when it’s done right.
But what about when it’s done wrong? Well, that’s what I’d like to talk about today, with regards to 2009’s sci-fi flick The Fourth Kind – and how it managed to stumble it’s way into paying out a $20,000 settlement after an attempted viral marketing campaign gone wrong.
The Fourth Kind, directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi and distributed by Universal Pictures, tapped in to the rising trend of mockumentary found footage genre fiction in the late 2000s – after the mega-hit of Paranormal Activity and Matt Reeves’ iconic Cloverfield, this approach to genre moviemaking had proved itself successful and, most importantly, profitable. The Fourth Kind took a sci-fi approach to the blossoming genre, purporting to tell the real-life story of a psychologist, Abbey Taylor, who uncovered memories of apparent alien abduction in her patients in the small town of Nome, Alaska – and, later, it seemed, even in herself.
Even within the movie itself, The Fourth Kind takes a markedly serious (or deceptive) approach to the matter of engrossing the audience in its world. The film opens with Mia Jovovich (greenscreened against a spectacularly hideous, nauseatingly spinning backdrop of poorly-rendered trees), as herself, explaining that this movie is a dramatization of events that occurred in 2000, and that the director has included actual archive footage alongside dramatization of the same. Jovovich assures audiences that every dramatized scene in this film is supported by archived video, audio, or testimony from Abbey Taylor herself, who Jovovich plays in the dramatizations.
The film then goes on to interview the “real” Abbey Taylor (played by actor Charlotte Milchard, who is not credited as Abbey Taylor in the credits but as a Nome resident), featuring the “real” Abbey in “archive” footage alongside Jovovich as Abbey in the dramatic reenactments. It goes without saying that none of this is true – Abbey Taylor isn’t a real person, and this story (aside from a general inspiration from a few missing persons’ cases in the area during this period) is entirely fictional, despite Jovovich’s claims to the contrary. There’s a part of me that admires a movie just bold-face lying right at the top to sell its legitimacy, but honestly, the two Abbeys just make this movie markedly more confusing, especially because Milchard is the far better actor of the two. It feels like Jovovich was brought in less to cast new light on the character and more to attach a bigger name to the project, with the rest of the main roles filled out by esteemed character actors like Will Patton and Elias Koteas who, despite their obvious skill, could have a harder time selling tickets.
But the deceptive approach to storytelling wasn’t limited to the on-screen escapades. No, in line with previous movies in a similar vein, The Fourth Kind created a website that purported to share a deep-dive into the missing persons’ cases that the film was loosely inspired by, featuring articles covering the disappearances that alleged to be from local Alaskan journalists. Which wouldn’t have been a problem, had the movie’s marketing department not actually used real news stories from Nome, Alaska as part of the campaign – or invented entirely fake stories covering the supernatural events referenced in the film that were credited to very real outlets.
Real Nome newspapers including the Nome Nugget and the Fairbanks Daily News Miner were amongst those to have completely fabricated stories credited to them as part of The Fourth Kind’s advertising campaign. The Fourth Kind (which was primarily shot in Bulgaria) had already earned some scepticism about the exploitation of real missing person’s cases in the area to sell this fictional alien abduction story – soon earned hefty backlash from the local press. Nancy McGuire, editor of the Nome Nugget, summed up her reaction to the fake articles attributed to her publication pretty succinctly: “what the fuck?”.
Once the stories were uncovered, it didn’t take long for the Alaska Press Club, along with various other websites and publications who had been falsely invoked in the film’s marketing campaign, to hit back at Universal for their deception. The matter was soon settled with Universal promising “the permanent disabling and removal of, and represents and warrants that it has already permanently disabled access to and removed from the Internet, all news articles” – but not before they had paid out $20,000 to the Alaska Press Club, as well as a $2500 donation to a scholarship fund.
However, Dermot Cole, writing for the Fairbanks Daily News Miner after the settlement was agreed upon, indicated that the damage had already been done to the credibility of the outlets used by the campaign – “I found the two fake stories attributed to the News-Miner on sites where they had been copied,” he pointed out. “Universal won’t be able to take those down”.
It’s quite shocking that a studio as big as Universal would make a mistake as obvious and easily avoidable as this one, but The Fourth Kind is proof that marketing campaigns need to keep themselves in check to keep from getting a pseudo-documentary just plain sued. If you’ve seen The Fourth Kind, did you think its approach was effective, or did it land on the wrong side of hammy for you? Let me know in the comments!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via YouTube)
No But Listen 