Smash hit

Was Slusho! the key to the mystery? Some people suggested that Slusho! and Tagruato, if they were not a real product and a real company, might be related not to Cloverfield, but to Alias or Lost. Another web poster was in no doubt as to what was happening. “I think it’s clear that Abrams, Bad Robot and Paramount are using Jackoway Tyreman Wertheimer as a cover to basically ‘launder’ all connections to the movie,” he wrote.

Other websites appeared that seemed to be connected to Cloverfield, including Ethan Haas Was Right, a reference to an HP Lovecraft character. But others argued that the only website directly connected to the film was 1-18-08.com. There, visitors could try to interpret the meanings of various time-coded photographs.

Whatever the truth of any of this, there was clearly some kind of inspired genius behind a viral marketing campaign that could generate such unprecedented levels of subterranean interest in a film that was months from release, had no recognisable stars, no obvious subject, not even a clear title. The hype was fuelled by Cloverfield posters that appeared showing a decapitated Statue of Liberty. The campaign, if it was a campaign, reminded some of the excitement generated in earlier internet days by that grainy early footage from The Blair Witch Project, the first film to exploit the internet as a marketing tool.

In fact, the only real clue as to what the film might really be about had been quietly dropped by Abrams himself in July, at Comic Con, the world’s largest comic-book convention.

“I want a monster movie, I’ve wanted one for so long,” he said.

“I was in Japan with my son, and all he wanted to do was go to toy stores. We saw all these Godzilla toys, and I thought, we need our own monster, not King Kong. King Kong’s adorable. I wanted something that was just insane and intense.”

In recent days, Matt Reeves, the film’s director, has finally been giving interviews to select sci-fi websites. Although he has not divulged secrets about the film’s plot, he did confirm that it is a classic monster movie, and that it has been shot to appear as if it’s Handycam footage later found by the government; footage shot by someone as he or she experienced and tried to survive the horrendous attack.

“We wanted this to be as if someone found a Handycam, took out the tape and put it in the player to watch it,” Reeves told the web- site ShockTillYouDrop.com. “What you’re watching is a home movie that then turns into something else. The other thing I think is very exciting is that this monster is huge, and you see everything. You see it, in a way, as if you’re shooting it with a Handycam.”

Reeves also said that the visual references to September 11 were deliberate. “Godzilla was very much about the A-bomb,” he said. “Cloverfield very much speaks to the fear and anxieties of our time, how we live our lives — constantly documenting things and putting them up on YouTube, sending people videos through e-mail.” He also made clear the real intention behind the film’s viral marketing campaign. “In today’s environment, you know everything about every movie before it comes out,” he told ign.com. “There’s so much information, people are so media-savvy. And we were just remembering when we were kids, and movies would come out, and you’d see a trailer, and you were, like, ‘What was that?!’ There was that sense of discovery.”

So, how much do we really know about Cloverfield? What about the huge lion? “At the last minute, when we were shooting the trailer,” Reeves said, “we wanted people to know — because we hadn’t created the monster yet — that it was a giant monster movie, we wanted a tease of that.

“So I jumped to the microphone and said the line, ‘I saw it! It’s alive! It’s huge!” And I came home, and someone on the web had already taken that section and started to do an analysis of it and thought I’d said, ‘It’s a lion.’ ”

So, it might, in fact, be a giant creature from the deep. One thing is certain, though: the intense interest in the film shown by the net-savvy signals a big, monster hit among those very teens and twentysomethings the cinema is trying to recapture from the clutches of the internet. And that, for the film industry, is no disaster.

Cloverfield opens in the UK on February 1

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