One of the best times to scare someone is immediately after they’ve seen a scary movie, when they’re still a bit on edge and jumpy, and production company A24 is definitely embracing that for a fun/spooky guerrilla marketing scheme in support of Ari Aster’s upcoming horror movie Hereditary. Apparently, people who attended a recent midnight screening of the film were greeted the next morning by packages containing unsettling little dolls and creepy notes. Moonlight director Barry Jenkins was one of the lucky few to get this horrible surprise, and he seemed appropriately unnerved by the experience:
Eric Vespe, formerly Quint of Ain’t It Cool News, also got one:
A24 even shared a photo of the whole collection, making them seem a bit more like bad Pokémon than scary promotional items.
In his Sundance review, The A.V. Club’s own A.A. Dowd said that Hereditary is “pure emotional terrorism” and “a serious, adult psychological study that also happens to double as impeccably crafted haunted-house ‘entertainment.’”