PVR Pictures has created an out-of-the-box format for the premiere screening for their film, Hereditary. Touted to be the scariest movie ever, director Ari Aster has attempted to take the words ‘horror’ and ‘thriller’ to another level.
Hereditary is a disruptive attempt to bring cinema and content-hungry patrons who aren’t satisfied by just another ‘scary’ horror film. The midnight screening gathered film enthusiasts of this captivating genre to step out late-night and catch a glimpse of this riveting content before India gets a taste of it.
The story-telling experience weaves in narratives and character plot into a captivating finale, packaged with a surreal score and gut-wrenching psychological moments of intense horror. Hereditary, as the name suggests, follows the life of family plagued by disorders of mental stability whilst living regular lives, like any other family we witness in our daily lives.
Keeping pace with Ari Aster’s disruptive filmmaking, the marketing initiatives married audience behaviour metrics with technology for the first time. For fans, influencers and celebrities alike the premise of late-night screening, which ended at an eerily odd hour, left everyone with gripping memories of what they just witnessed. Innovation and technology are at the forefront of all modern-day insights, selected patrons were fitted with heart-rate monitors to capture live data on the ‘peaks’ of horror throughout the duration of the film.
Patrons were slotted with gopro cameras to understand further behavioural catharsis which they experienced during the film. These data inputs provided an in-depth understanding of when at what time of the film and by how much did were they engaged during the film.
Such an activity is first of its kind in India even though case studies are scarce on this initiative. Yet the vision to execute this lies solely with the team at the helm of this marketing innovation.
The average heart beats per minute extracted, by observing seven-eight peaks of as high as 136 bpm helped PVR Pictures understand the sentiments and emotional well being of the patrons while they immersed themselves in the midnight screening. Even the toughest ones showed vulnerability when faced with an epic thriller and emotionally vested film like Hereditary.
The cameras captured the moments and further asserted the data extrapolated by these ‘heart rate monitors’ and ‘fit-bits’. In fact, the audience reviews pre and post the film have factually proven with this disruptive innovation, what this horror fiesta is all about. This experience might mark the beginning of a new IP called ‘Scare meter’ to tell audiences exactly how gripping a film would be.
Directed by Ari Aster, Hereditary stars debutant Toni Collette, along with Alex Wolf, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, and Gabriel Byrne. It is a harrowing story of an unthinkable family tragedy that veers into the realm of the supernatural when the Graham family starts to unravel the mysteries following the death of their reclusive grandmother.
Even after she’s gone, the matriarch still casts a dark shadow over the family, especially her loner teenage granddaughter, Charlie, whom she always had an unusual fascination with. As an overwhelming terror takes over their household, their peaceful existence is ripped apart, forcing their mother to explore a darker realm in order to escape the unfortunate fate they’ve inherited.
