How Neon Flipped Movie Marketing on Its Head to Make ‘Longlegs’ the Indie Hit of the Year

The first footage of Longlegs director Osgood Perkins shared with distributors Neon was a short clip showing the Nicolas Cage reveal.

“It was a very tiny piece of footage, a very early image and I’ve never seen anything like that,” remembers Neon boss Tom Quinn. “If it wasn’t Nick Cage [doing that performance] it would be absolutely batshit crazy,” “The fact that it was Nick Cage made it times 10. We thought: ‘If Cage is doing that, we have to be involved.”

“What triggered it for us was hearing him,” adds Neon marketing head Christian Parkes. “It was unlike anything we’d heard before. It could only have come from Cage. It was: this is something that we have to take really seriously.”

For those of you who haven’t seen Longlegs, look away now. The following includes spoilers for the most successful independent release of 2024, The film where Neon tossed out the marketing rule book and staged a guerrilla marketing campaign that resulted in Perkins’ serial killer thriller opening, in the middle of the summer, to $22 million on its first weekend, en route to a $75 million domestic gross and $100 million at the box office worldwide, making Longlegs the most successful indie horror film in a decade.

If you have seen Longlegs, you know exactly what Quinn and Perkins are talking about. Cage as Longlegs, an elusive serial killer being tracked by FBI Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), is so transformed as to be almost unrecognizable. His face, covered in heavy white makeup, is a swollen, disfigured mask of silicon and prosthetics. His lips are puffy and pale. His white books, white jacket and long scraggly hair give him the androgynous feel of a glam rocker gone to seed. Then there’s the voice. Cage twists his usual film noir growl into a high-pitched singsong as Longlegs mutters to himself, spouting Biblical warnings and Satanic praise, before suddenly screaming at no one in particular.

It’s one of the most terrifying, bizarre and full-on performances of Cage’s career, a career with no shortage of bizarre, full-on performances. The Cage reveal, which comes deep into the film, is the Longlegs money shot, its WTF moment.

Neon decided to keep it hidden. Instead of splashing Cage as Longlegs over every piece of marketing they could, targeting the actor’s huge and loyal fan base they took another tack. They used the Jaws playbook.

“Tom has said, time and time again, that one of the reasons Jaws is the greatest film ever, one of the reasons it works so well is because you don’t see the shark,” says Parkes. “So we thought, let’s not show the shark. Let’s not show Cage. Let’s hold him back.”

Ditching the idea of a campaign that would “spoon-feed” their audience with “the standard, teaser, trailer, poster and TV spots,” Parkes and Neon designed a marketing campaign to mirror the film’s mystery plot, in which Monroe, as Agent Lee Harker, tries to piece together clues to find the killer who has been murdering young children for decades.

The entire campaign was to be a “series of breadcrumbs” designed to turn horror fans into true crime detectives. Starting in early 2024, the first crumbs, disturbing images and videos, including ones featuring a creepy family photo, a nun in a black habit, and a wall with a cryptic message, were dropped online, and released on different platforms at different times of the day. There was no film title, no company logo. No Maika Monroe. No Nick Cage.

The Internet started chattering.

“The theories were just running wild on every platform, Reddit in particular, and we threw some chum at those guys,” Parkes chuckles.

When Neon dropped the first teaser, it had no dialog, Monroe was only glimpsed from behind, and Cage remained in the shadows. The last shot was a cipher code that turns into the title of the film: Longlegs.

The response was immediate.

“The feedback from online and social was: ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but I love this. I don’t want to see anything else from this film. I’m already sold,” says Parkes. Neon had already cut a trailer for the film —”a great trailer, the kind of trailer you would expect if you took a very conventional, linear marketing approach” — but with Longlegs taking on a life of its own online, with fans clamoring for less certainty, not more, the company changed its strategy.

Quinn and Parkes called up Nicolas Cage to ask him if they could keep his image off any marketing materials.

“Nick started, saying ‘am I right to believe that you’re going to withhold my magnificent grotesqueness until later in the campaign?”” Parkes recalls. “You can see him saying it, right? And I said: ‘Actually, Nick, we don’t want to show you at all.’ He rocked back in his chair and smiled. And just like that, we knew we were good.”

Neon continued to focus its Longlegs campaign on horror superfans, the sort of obsessives who would scour the Internet and troll through online forums looking for any new, any crumbs or clues, rumors or speculation about the movie. If they could win over those folks, they figured they would have an army of self-motivated marketers ready to spread the word.

“From the jump, we said we need to respect the horror audience, the genre audience, because they’re largely underserved, I think, by distributors and studios,” says Parkes. “If we treat them with respect, if we talk to them on their terms and on their level and bring them along, they will invest in this film, carry this film and make it their own.”

That meant a focus on digital and “organic” marketing, with very few traditional media buys. “The entire release budget across all creative materials, all media, all theatrical investment and all publicity investment to open the film was just under $10 million,” says Parkes. “Online media was about 70 percent of that. We did very targeted buys on Hulu, a little bit on Amazon. And no TV.”

Outside marketing was “ridiculously light” consisting of a handful of bus shelter ads and four billboards in Los Angeles.

“If you buy a board on Sunset [Boulevard] it can cost you $250,000. If you buy a board on La Brea below Olympic, it costs $7,000,” Parkes says, “so we bought the $7,000 boards.”

The billboards didn’t include the film’s title — though they did have the release date, 7.12., in the bottom corner — and all featured Nick Cage as Longlegs but, sticking to its Jaws strategy, they were cropped to hide more than they revealed. One just showed the lower half of his face. Another showed a single eye peering in from the left corner. One had a phone number. Call the number and you got a recorded message, insidiously creepy and unpleasant, of Cage in character as Longlegs: “There she is, the almost birthday girl. What’s your name? Little angel.”

“People started pranking their parents, texting them: ‘Hey Mom, I just got a new phone number. Can you check it out and make sure that it works?’ and send them the Longlegs number, then screenshotting the text exchange,” says Parkes. “We got more than 1.5 million calls from over 60 countries. From a single board, for a couple of thousand bucks.”

Neon is as obsessive about testing and tracking as any studio major. For every release campaign they monitor online awareness, social media mentions, affinity sharing and a dozen other metrics. Their work with horror masters Blumhouse — Neon and Blumhouse co-run BH Tilt, which has released microbudget genre titles like Upgrade and The Belko Experiment —has made them, says Quinn, “particularly sensitive to some of the subset numbers” of the horror superfans. Deep into the Longlegs campaign, one number in particular told them their strategy was working.

“Unaided awareness for horror fans was a 10 for the film,” says Quinn. “That was a key indicator that this was going to open well beyond projections.”

When Neon pre-bought Longlegs, on the script, Osgood’s name and the mini-clip of Cage, “we were projecting a $10 million gross,” remembers Quinn. “We saw the film and upped that to a $25 million target.” After their marketing campaign, in the weeks ahead of release, “we saw something much bigger.”

Longlegs was dated for July 12, 2024, smack in the middle of the summer blockbuster season, designed as counter-programming for the family-friendly studio fare on offer: Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4 and Fly Me To the Moon.

Neon kept dropping the breadcrumbs. On June 14 they took out a Zodiac Killer-inspired ad in the San Francisco Times, written in the Longlegs cipher code, which led to BirthdayMurders.net, a website purporting to document 20 years of backstory on the Longlegs murders. They released a video of Monroe in character meeting Longlegs for the first time — Cage’s face was blacked out — with a recording of her heart rate jumping from 76 BPM to 170 BPM. Chum for hungry horror stans.

On its first weekend, Longlegs opened at number 2, behind only Despicable Me 4 in its sophomore frame, grossing $22.4 million. The film would stay in the top 10 through mid-August and stay in theaters until Halloween. The final U.S. take was $74.35 million, surpassing Oscar-winner Parasite ($53 million domestic) to become Neon’s highest-grossing film of all time. Longlegs blew past A24’s Talk to Me and Focus Features’ Insidious Chapter 3 to become the most successful indie horror film of the last 10 years. For a $10 million movie and less than $10 million in marketing.

Neon’s guerrilla campaign for Longlegs was too bespoke, too project-specific, to provide a one-size-fits-all blueprint for the industry. But their strategy of breadcrumbs over billboards, social media drops over TV spots, and the need to empower fans to become partners rather than passive consumers, is already rewriting the rulebook for indie film promotion.