Brands Are Getting Scarily Good at Spooky Marketing

As horror heats up pop culture, some advertisers are even casting their own products as the villain

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The post-holiday doldrums of February are typically when the movies that studios don’t expect to do much business hit theaters. But in 2017, the winter month saw the release of Jordan Peele’s Get Out, the cultural phenomenon that upended the horror genre and everything we knew about its audience.

Since then, it seems like horror is everywhere, from movies like Midsommar and A Quiet Place to smash Netflix series Stranger Things and Squid Game to Evil Dead director Sam Raimi bringing his campy-yet-scary aesthetic to Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness this summer. 

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This story first appeared in the Oct. 24, 2022, issue of Adweek magazine. Click here to subscribe.