10 Desperate Ways To Market Horror Movies

The Village was a hugely important film in the career of M. Night Shyamalan at the time of its release.

After receiving universal praise for The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, Shyamalan's 2002 Signs split opinion. And so, the movie that came after Signs - as in, The Village - was a pivotal one in proving whether or not the filmmaker was as good as The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable had suggested.

A period picture about a small community whose residents daren't go into the nearby woods for fear of the creatures that lie within, The Village was ultimately a so-so affair. Away from the movie itself, one element received hugely negatively was using a three-hour fake documentary on Shyamalan to promote the movie.

Titled The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan, the writer/director teamed with Sci-Fi Channel to make a documentary about how he's able to communicate with spirits after dying for 30 minutes as a youngster. This doc painted Shyamalan as an intense, erratic, short-tempered, mysterious figure and was backed up by reports from Johnny Depp, Adrian Brody and others.

When Sci-Fi's Bonnie Hammer eventually revealed this was merely a "guerrilla marketing" stunt to garner press for The Village, it left many - including Sci-Fi's parent company NBCUniversal - extremely irked.