With the recent launch of the viral marketing campaign for the upcoming Jurassic Park reboot “Jurassic World” which can be found at Masraniglobal, we thought it’d be interesting to look at the best movies to utilize the unique marketing tactic. First off, what is viral marketing with movies? It can vary greatly, but a few examples are infiltrating towns and cities with clues and props, creating fake websites and news stories, engaging citizens and fans in new ways, and ultimately blurring the lines between what is real and what isn’t.

Here is a list of the top five movies to use a viral marketing campaign. As you’ll see, Sci-Fi movies usually top the list due to their creative and unique nature.

1. The Dark Knight- After Christopher Nolan released “Batman Begins” and pleased both moviegoers and comic fans, “The Dark Knight” started off with some skepticism from his casting decisions. To combat those doubts, Nolan and his crew infiltrated the web and Comic Con with one of the most interactive viral marketing campaigns ever both physically and electronically. Creating websites and political campaigns for Harvey Dent, they successfully engaged fans and made Dent’s campaign seem real. They later created a scavenger hunt, much like the one the Joker employed in the movie, that got over 10 million fans participating and running around cities all over the globe. We clearly know how well that worked, as the movie will go down as one of the best superhero movies ever directed.

2. District 9- The film is based off of a short movie on YouTube that later gained backing from Peter Jackson, so it was destined for big things. The film’s marketing was smart by making the first trailers of the film show almost no aliens, much like J.J. Abrams. If you watch the trailers again, you’ll see that they make it seem like a foreign group has just taken over South Africa, but they purposefully fail to mention that it’s aliens. The major viral marketing behind the film though is how they integrated aspects of the film into real life. If you rode public transportation in major cities in 2009 there’s a good chance you saw their bus stop posters saying “Humans Only” and forbidding alien presence. You could say their tactics caused some confusion and sparked major interest in the film.

3. The Blair Witch Project- Seen as the film that introduced viral marketing, “The Blair Witch Project” blazed the trail for the other films on this list. The most impressive part about this film is that it was made in 1999 and was able to employ this technique before the Internet was so accessible and user-friendly like it is today. The filming style and the story was already creative and realistic enough, but the forums and discussions that it sparked helped it to gross over $250 million. Whether it was the marketing team or the horrifically perplexed fans that started the online discussion of its reality, it was still one of the first films to blur the lines between reality and cinema fiction.

4. Cloverfield- J.J. Abrams has made his name as one of the best to employ viral marketing, and “Cloverfield” was one of the defining factors as to how he was able to go from conquering TV to dominating the big screen. The first images of the film that viewers saw was a handheld, first-person view of a party and friends wishing their best to a friend who was leaving. Halfway through the clip it turns to chaos and the statue of liberty’s head comes tumbling down a city street. All fans are shown at the end is the producer and the release date. Not even a title. Just by omitting the title he already sparked more interest in his movie than the one fans came to see. With that, Abrams’ team released a fake company website called “Tagruato” and news footage of a rescue near an oilrig that was being destroyed in the ocean. The mystery piled on as fans slowly found clues and learned of the perceived origin of a monster that they knew nothing about. Despite viewer’s hatred of the filming style, the marketing proved genius for this type of film.

5. Super 8- Another Abrams title, “Super 8” was set in the late 70’s and the title refers to both the old-fashioned format of filming, as well as the director and producer’s first cameras. The viral marketing did some of the same things as “Cloverfield” but was able to do it with the feeling of the late 70’s technology and artwork. The first thing released in the campaign was the teaser that was a lens and rolling film. When the rolling film footage was slowed down and decoded, it spelled “The Scariest Thing I Ever Saw,” which led to the domain name of the simple website ScariestThingIEverSaw.com. The website consisted of just a simple 16-bit microcomputer display that when accessed displayed the message “Stop posting publicly. I can answer your questions. I have proof.” Eerie, right? A lot more intricacies went in later on in the year leading to the film’s release, but it’s too extensive to dive into fully.