Quote:
Originally Posted by Bieeanda
The likelihood that they're trying to market to a tiny fetish community is so small, it's not even worth commenting on. They're going to get a lot more mileage out of basic 'WTF' from the general public (or at least as general as sites like unfiction get, with their own Alternate Reality Game obsession) than spending tens of thousands of dollars on prosthetics merely to cater to a small audience with a hard-on for girls getting bigger.
It is a traditional horror movie-- if the trailers suggest anything, it's that the movie is in the Lovecraftian tradition to be precise, and we won't see shit of the monsters save for their passage. That's probably why they're hyping it in this manner. They pay a PR firm to come up with some weird teasers (the ARG attached to Cloverfield isn't as elaborate as others, but it's still effective) and the crowd makes its own hype. Look at the Blair Witch Project as a classic example: the public went in already scared because the commercials and teasers were engineered to pique curiosity and make people feel uncomfortable.
And remember, while people like us get off on transformation and mutation and inflation and -ion, the general public has a deep seated fear of these things. That's what they're going to be playing on, if they have any idea what they're doing. If something is happening to the girl in the looping clip that people keep theorizing on, chances are it's going to leave her in bits all over the walls (a la the 'inflation' scene from Slither) or in a form that only the most hard-core isopodiphile would be aroused by. The point isn't to titillate weight-gain enthusiasts, it's to terrify a culture that's already scared shitless of ideas like 'cancer' and 'tumor' and has a whole panoply of unhealthy body image issues. They don't know what's happening to the girl, and they want to rubberneck. While they know on an intellectual level that it can't happen to them, they still want some kind of reassurance or catharsis.
The real question is, whether the movie is going to deliver on anything that the public assumes it's actually offering. Cloverfield is going to do amazingly on opening weekend, but if there's nothing of substance there, it's going to submarine like the thing leaving a wake in the poster.
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This is one of the single, if not "the", most well thought out and intelligent pieces of introspective insight into American culture, and just damn good writing in general, that I have ever seen, never mind the awe-inspiring fact that it came from the internet off some random obscure fetish board.
Bieeanda, feel proud today, because your writing was so articulate that it actually made a person de-lurk, and not only that, but to give you a compliment of all things. You should feel proud. :P