Amanda Taylor, a film blogger and Democratic candidate running for Missouri’s House of Representatives, called the police after she mistook promotional material for the new horror movie The First Omen as pro-life propaganda.
Last month, Taylor received an anonymous letter in the mail that included a single child-like drawing of what appeared to be four dark figures surrounding a young girl in mid-air suspension.
“Right away, I was thinking, ‘Ah, this has something to do with abortion,’” Taylor told Business Insider. “The day before I had received something from a pro-life organisation so I was like, ‘Okay, I’m starting to receive all the propaganda stuff.’”
Taylor said that she then sent the mysterious letter to her campaign advisor, who immediately called the police out of fear that it had come from an unhappy, pro-life constituent.
“She called me, and she was like, ‘Put that into a plastic bag, wash your hands, the police are on the way,’” Taylor said, explaining that there was concern the letter had been laced with a dangerous substance.
After a couple of weeks, it was eventually discovered that the letter had been sent from Walt Disney Studio’s senior publicist, Marshall Weinbaum.
The drawing had apparently been a part of the company’s promotional campaign for its new horror film, The First Omen, starring Bill Nighy.
This doesn’t sound like an effective marketing campaign, if the recipient hasn’t got a clue what it’s about.
It’s extremely effective. For the cost of a letter the film got mentioned in a major UK newspaper, and as a Frenchman who doesn’t care about horror films at all, I now know about the upcoming movie The First Omen, starring Bill Nighty.
Only because the paranoid twit called the police. If not, they’d have been clueless as to what was going on.
Sure, it was almost certainly not the intended goal (send mysterious promo material to “film bloggers” to pique their curiosity I guess), but the point is it worked even better :)
Through sheer dumb luck.