Here is the TV spot for the new horror film Mirrors, which opened this past weekend and will be instantly forgotten by anyone who saw it.
Pretty boilerplate in every respect, every "shock" cut and weird noise coming exactly when you expect them. And more, this commercial is targeted to the type of audience that would go see a movie like this; it ran mostly on MTV and other channels thought by ad buyers to appeal to a youthful audience.
And they turned out, but will anyone remember the movie? Or more to the point, will anyone remember this ad? Will it still be remembered decades later, as so many children of the seventies remember the dread that filled them every time this spot came on screen?
Or this one. When the mostly black screen appeared during a commercial break for some bland seventies TV fare, and that voice-over comes on, so barely controlled, as if the announcer was on the verge of hysteria ("something...almost beyond comprehension"), there was a feeling that the world had gone slightly off its tracks, as the comforting, familiar presence of Sonny & Cher cracked open to reveal something too terrible to show, too terrible to imagine.
Or consider this.
The Town That Dreaded Sundown was strictly drive-in fare, so this ad wouldn't have been shown during prime-time. No, this would have come on later at night, during the local movie, when the lights are mostly down and everyone else had gone to bed, and there you are watching The Doberman Gang or some such, and the announcer starts reciting this litany of the dead, and suddenly that guy in the hood appears in a doorway, and out of the corner of your eye you see a shadow flicker, and your heart jumps and you turn, but hey, it's just a junebug circling around the porchlight. Nothing to worry about, no reason for your hands to be trembling as you lean back on the couch, but then you hear this thumping out on the porch, then a flash of lightning and the power goes off just for a second...
No, I don't think that ad for Mirrors has that kind of impact.
