I’m generally not a fan of the horror genre. There’s very little original content out there and quite frankly it just doesn’t interest me. I know I should take the time, based on the recommendations of Vonder Harr and Cregar, to seek out the worthy entries but I just can’t work up the strength. That being said I am a big thriller fan. The entries of M. Night Shamylan have been alright – occasionally peaking at pretty good – but thrillers are much harder to do and much harder to market. They don’t offer the blood and gore appeal the (increasingy campy) horror flicks do.
That’s why Red Eye looks so appealing. Directed by Wes Craven it tells the story of a woman (Rachel McAdams) who meets a guy (Cillian Murphy) in an airport who at first is charming and funny but turns out to be much darker. Trapped aboard an airplane together she has to try and escape or foil his plan while not endangering the rest of the people aboard.
Two posters were what I found for this movie. Neither of them really falls under the category of “teaser” because both don’t show any faces or really much of anything. The first has the body of the airplane with a hand pressed up against a window while the other shows a woman’s arm being restrained by a man’s in the seat next to her. Both work extremely well for me since they play up the idea of the movie being a thriller and are, at least to me, genuinely chilling.
For over a minute both trailers play like it’s setting up a romantic comedy. McAdams and Murphy seem to meet-cute in the airport and flirt a bit, ending up coincidentally sitting next to each other on the plane. It’s then things turn dark and it’s here the two trailers diverge in content and quality.
The teaser keeps things mysterious, showing a few fleeting images and the briefest and most ambiguous of plot setups. It works very well and is what initially got me excited about the movie. The theatrical trailer, though, starts showing all kinds of people running, a missile being launched at a building and eventually ends in “narrator guy” giving us some very lame marketing copy. It’s almost enough to turn me off the movie entirely, but not quite.
A pretty solid site for this flick. Nothing remarkable but definitely a solid double to the wall.
Aside from the usual fare there is “Board the Red Eye”. Click on that link and you wind up navigating through various clips, shaky objects you have to click on and such. There’s no real point to it but it is pretty cool to play around with to some extent. It would be great if there was some sort of endgame here. It’s like they had this great idea, didn’t know how to end it, but decided to put it on the site anyway.
Among the standard offerings are Downloads, About the Movie, Story and a pretty good Photo Gallery.
Overall
I want to see it and I’m not usually drawn to this kind of movie, so I have to say the campaign (except for the last third of the theatrical trailer) did its job pretty well. I would have liked to have seen a bit more creativity on the website but then again that’s one of my regular rants so I won’t repeat it here.
[Update, Cregar’s blog has moved. The bastard changed his URL the same day I throw him a friggin’ bone. Here‘s the new link and I’ve fixed it above.]
Chris Thilk 
Saw it last night. Surprisingly good. My biggest complaint is, ironically enough, the marketing. If DW had presented this as a romantic comedy, it would’ve been much more effective when the reveal finally happened.
Oh, and for future reference, it’s “Vonder Haar.” That’s far from the weirdest spelling I’ve seen, however.