Neon Wanted to Meet Horror Fans ‘on Their Terms and on Their Level’ with ‘Longlegs’ Marketing Campaign, Creating the Indie Blockbuster of the Year

“Longlegs” had the longest legs at the box office of any indie film in 2024, a triumph for the Neon marketing team.

Neon marketing executive Christian Parkes told The Hollywood Reporter that his campaign for the horror film focused on appealing to the genre audience as opposed to relying on the star power of actor Nicolas Cage, or showing any of its thrills in trailers.

“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,” Parkes said. “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.”

And that’s exactly what horror fans did: “Longlegs” went on to gross $22 million its opening weekend and ultimately made $75 million domestic and $100 million at the worldwide box office. The film beat out big-budget studio tentpoles like “Furiosa” at the box office, and became a certified viral hit.

“Longlegs” was written and directed by Osgood Perkins, whose upcoming Stephen King adaptation “The Monkey” is also a Neon release. “The Monkey” stars Theo James and opens in theaters February 21. Perkins also has a third film set at studio Neon; its details remain under wraps, however.

While “The Monkey” has gone the route of a more standard marketing campaign thus far, “Longlegs” leaned into the “organic” marketing approach with limited 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,” Parkes said. “Online media was about 70 percent of that. We did very targeted buys on Hulu, a little bit on Amazon. And no TV.”

He continued, “If you buy a [bill]board on Sunset [Blvd.] it can cost you $250,000. If you buy a board on La Brea below Olympic, it costs $7,000, so we bought the $7,000 boards.” Those billboards included a number to call for a recorded message from Cage’s titular villain. The ad generated more than 1.4  million calls from 68 countries.

The goal for the campaign was to give a “series of breadcrumbs” for horror fans to solve the case at the center of the film — or rather, step into the role of the FBI agent played by Maika Monroe, who was tasked with figuring out who Longlegs is exactly. That meant not showing star Cage.

“[Neon CEO Tom Quinn] 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,” Parkes said. “So we thought, let’s not show the shark. Let’s not show Cage. Let’s hold him back.”

Neon actually already had a trailer for the film, which Parkes said was ”a great trailer, the kind of trailer you would expect if you took a very conventional, linear marketing approach,” but it was scrapped after the guerrilla campaign gained traction first.

“The theories were just running wild on every platform, Reddit in particular, and we threw some chum at those guys,” Parkes said of the teased take on the film. “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.”

And even Cage supported being hidden in the ads. “Nic started, saying, ‘Am I right to believe that you’re going to withhold my magnificent grotesqueness until later in the campaign?,’” Parkes said of Cage. “You can see him saying it, right? And I said, ‘Actually, Nic, 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.”