12 Films Ruined By Their Marketing

Some marketing is a bit more difficult than others. When working with complex films, you have to walk the fine line that is not giving the entire thing away, while also not setting up false expectations.

Sadly, the marketing for Drew Goddard's excellent slice of meta-horror was unable to do either. Cabin is a unique joyride of a film that is essentially a love letter to horror cinema, which pretty much takes the decades of horror films that existed before it and canonizes their existence into its own backstory and mythology. It's also gut-busting-ly funny when it's not being downright horrific.

When you put all of that together, you get one tough sell of a movie.

The marketing fell into the trap of making the film look too much like a straight-forward horror flick about a cabin in the woods. The trailers felt trite and cliched in the worst of ways, as if the film had nothing new to offer. Which is made all the worse by the realization that the trailers also managed to spoil some key plot points, such as including a shot showing that the cabin was enclosed in a technological dome and was being monitored.

Thus, we got a marketing campaign that was the absolute worst of both worlds and did nothing but hurt the film itself.