The Cloverfield Hype... and Slusho

Web-savvy movie lovers have been buzzing about Cloverfield for months, thanks to a viral marketing strategy-meets-alternate-reality game.

Starting in early July 2007, a mysterious movie trailer began showing in theaters nationwide during screenings of Transformers. The film, which opens today, had no name, but the trailer was stamped with a date of 01-18-08 and said it was produced by J.J. Abrams, of the TV show Lost.

The curious headed online to try to track down information about the film.

Under Abrams' filmography on the Web site imdb.com, a clue was discovered — a listing for a project titled Clover, aka the Untitled J.J. Abrams Project, with a synopsis: "a giant monster movie (referred internally as The Parasite) which is shot using home video cameras from the point of view of real people who are experiencing the attack on New York City."

Followers of the movie-to-be debated what the monster could be. Was it the return of Godzilla or Voltron? Leviathan? Or a new monster?

Message boards lit up as clues were discovered, including the Web site 1-18-08.com, which contained a single photo of two women looking up in horror — at what, of course, was the question.

Other Web sites, including www.slusho.jp, raised more questions than they answered. What did this drink, with its "deep-sea ingredient," have to do with the creature that attacked New York, and why was one of the characters in the film wearing a Slusho T-shirt?

By the end of July, MySpace pages of characters in the film were discovered. Amusingly, they were blogging in real-time and have continued to do so up until the film's release. On Jan. 4, for instance, the main character Rob Hawkins blogged on his MySpace page (www.myspace.com/robbyhawkins) that he'd just been hired as vice president for marketing and promotions for Slusho and was moving to Japan in mid-January. The movie documents the ill-fated night of Rob's going-away party on Jan. 18.

Here's a trailer of the movie uploaded on YouTube:



For links to all the Cloverfield-related Web sites, and to catch up on the buzz, check out the fan site www.cloverfieldclues.com.

{source}

--------------
technorati tags: cloverfield, slusho, cloverfield movie, youtube