If you have been checking your social networks or even been passing by a computer for the last week, I guess you have seen this marketing campaign to promote Rings (2017). The prank consisted in a wall of TVs in an electronics store showing the image of Samara, the popular evil creature from the Rings franchise. But, one of those TV sets had a scary surprise, since Samara herself starts to crawl our of it right before the eyes of incautious shoppers.
Not only the videos of this prank had become quite viral in the last week, but Paramount Pictures, the company responsable for this new movie, has made sure the clip was promoted in all the main social networks like Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. This is a similar action to what Paramount performed to promote their remake of Carrie back in 2013. In that time, a discussion in a coffee shop ended up with a young girl displaying her telekinetic powers against a customer that dropped coffee on her, all witnessed by the rest of freaked out customers:
Rings (2017) is the third installment of an american trilogy remake from the original successful japanese horror film Ringu (1998) (which also became a trilogy in its original country). The first two films, The Ring (2002) and The Ring Two (2005) were starred by Naomi Watts. This third episode of the franchise is directed by spaniard Francisco Javier Gutiérrez, who gained quite good recognition with his debut film Tres días aka Before the Fall (2008). The cast is leaded by Vincent D’Onofrio, Laura Wiggins, Aimee Teegarden and Johnny Galecki, while Samara is this time incarnated by Bonnie Morgan.
“A young woman becomes worried about her boyfriend when he explores a dark subculture surrounding a mysterious videotape said to kill the watcher seven days after he has viewed it. She sacrifices herself to save her boyfriend and in doing so makes a horrifying discovery: there is a ‘movie within the movie’ that no one has ever seen before…”, reads the plot. This film, which is expected to be a box office success, will hit theatres this february.
So what would you do if you were a victim of this prank?
