As trailers confirm Spiral: From The Book Of Saw will be hitting theatres in mid-2020, audiences wonder if the Saw franchise will bring back its iconic and creative blood donation market campaign.
Movies often run interesting marketing campaigns in the lead-up to release. Horror, especially, has flourished under creative promotional advertising, dating back to the 1950s when director William Castle used props to enhance the moviegoing experience for horror fans. For the 1959 House On Haunted Hill, he propped a skeleton to float over audiences during the movie’s climax; for Tingler, he used electric buzzers to create the same sensation explored in the movie: a parasite attaching to a person’s backbone. Horror is such a visceral, gut-level genre, its marketing campaigns often lean into desired fan participation, closing the gap between vicariously watching and vicariously living.
In 1999, The Blair Witch Project leaned into its documentary bent to produce one of the most iconic viral campaigns in movie history. A full year before the film hit theaters, the The Blair Witch Project team began to cultivate a mythos around the movie. They created a website about the legend explored in the film, uploaded police photos, shots of news coverage, family interviews, sections of one filmmaker’s journal. Ten years later, Paranormal Activity took a completely different, but equally well-received, route. It used night-vision footage of audiences watching the movie to market it, proving it could deliver on its promises while involving fan in the movie's success. The campaign yielded extremely positive results, with Paranormal Activity becoming one of the most profitable movies ever, in terms of production cost to box office gross. The Saw franchise has been a part of this legacy of creative campaigns, running blood drives to promote six of its seven movies.
The Jigsaw Blood Drive is a well-established tradition in the franchise that dates to the release of Saw in 2004. Production company Lionsgate first proposed the idea as a way of drawing audiences to this relatively unknown "torture porn" flick. Lionsgate connected with the American Red Cross to run country-wide blood drives that offered a free ticket to the latest installment in the Saw franchise to those who donated a pint of blood. The campaign’s mascot, a nurse who gets sadistic pleasure from taking people’s blood, has become an icon in her own right despite never appearing in the movies. From a purely promotional standpoint, Spiral should do a blood drive because it has traditionally yielded results.
On a more principled note, the Jigsaw Blood Drive is a force for good. Since 2004, the Saw franchise has collected 120,000 pints of blood from fans, saving 360,000 lives. It is a marketing campaign that manages to benefit all parties involved; horror fans with little pocket change get to go to the movies, blood banks replenish their stores, and the Saw movies generate hype. It gives the bloodbath nature of the movies a sense of purpose. The 2017 blood drive for Jigsaw managed to push the envelope further by protesting discriminatory practices in blood banks. With a campaign titled “All Types Welcome”, it protested the exclusion of LGBTQ men in blood donation. Using a diverse array of models, including trans idol Amanda LePore, they pushed their messaging while taking advantage of a wide-scale platform; in total, Lionsgate has around 4.5 million followers across social media.
The Jigsaw Blood Drive would provide an opportunity for Spiral: From The Book Of Saw to continue this effective and powerful tradition, using advertising to find the common ground between horror fans and do-gooders: blood.
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