Whoops, Disney PR's First Omen campaign spooked someone so bad they called the cops

It’s hard to say, on reflection, whether scaring someone so badly that they call the cops counts as good PR for a horror movie, or bad. But it certainly happened recently, as THR notes that a recent mailer campaign for new 20th Century Pictures/Disney horror flick The First Omen was so successful that a film blogger and political candidate thought she was being threatened with murder. Whoops!

To be fair, the campaign seems to have been designed to maximize creepiness, with Disney mailing out envelopes containing nothing but creepy children’s pictures, drawn from imagery associated with the film. (Which is the latest installment in the long-running horror franchise, which dates all the way back to 1976.)  A separate letter sent along after the first explained that this was just a fun PR campaign, but the thing about sending that kind of info in a second letter is, well, it creates a gap where all you know is “Someone has decided to send me creepy drawn pictures of kids!”

And if you’re also a Missouri-based politician running for the state’s House of Representatives on a pro-choice ticket, well… You can kind of imagine what happens next, yeah? Anyway, blogger and politician Amanda Taylor was freaked out enough that she filed a police report about the mysterious letter, telling THR, “I was freaking out. My husband touched it, so I’m screaming at him to wash his hands.” THR also talked to the guy behind the campaign, Disney PR person Marshall Weinbaum, who said he was inspired by the fact that, “in the movie, there are these creepy drawings of little girls with their faces crossed out, so I got this idea to print them out and mail them to the press.” Weinbaum expressed his regret at scaring the shit out of Taylor, but noted that, “most people had fun with it.”