Campaign Trail is our analysis of some of the best new creative efforts from the marketing world. View past columns in the archives here.
Horror films don’t always need zombies, vampires or ghosts to stir up suspense: Some of the best scary movies revolve around babysitting, bullying or even just birds. For its latest brand campaign, sleep device company Hatch found something as terrifying as it is quotidian: doomscrolling in bed and losing sleep.
“Goodnight, Phone” is a 90-second trailer for a horror film that doesn’t exist. Starring “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” star and horror regular Kiernan Shipka, the trailer continues the brand’s work to highlight the dangers of disordered sleep caused by doomscrolling. In addition to running online, it is appearing in theaters through Nov. 1.
“We wanted to keep pushing up against phone use in bed, and really take it to be extreme and show the dangers and horrors of what happens if you keep doomscrolling in bed and lose sleep. We pushed it to 100 and decided to lean into horror film tropes,” said Hatch Executive Creative Director Rinee Shah.
The trailer, helmed by up-and-coming director Meredith Alloway, follows a young couple who have moved into a new house. Shipka's character can't stop scrolling, and is soon besieged by phantom TikTok twins, a "Ring"-inspired doppelganger and her fair share of body horror (e.g. bloody thumbs and a swallowed powercord). Meanwhile, her partner (played by Jacob Lumet Cannavale) is sleeping well thanks to a key decision.
“She’s losing her mind,” Shah said of Shipka’s character. “She's on the phone, but her boyfriend is the calm person that doesn't have a care in the world. She's going through a horrific time, and he's just peacefully sleeping next to her the whole time. We wanted to show that difference of doomscrolling in bed and sleeping with a Hatch, and having those boundaries.”
Bare bones and beyond
Hatch, founded in 2014, launched a campaign in January for its Restore 3 product called “Goodnight Phone, Hello Sleep” that also revolved around stopping scrolling at bedtime. The opportunity to end the year with a big creative swing made a Halloween-ready ad an attractive proposition.
Hatch’s in-house team enlisted Alloway, a director whose forthcoming feature debut is produced by Diablo Cody, and presented a brief that represented the “bare bones of a story,” Shah said. The team quickly began pulling horror film references and deciding the most impactful scenes to shoot when the final product is a film trailer.
“The initial North Star was the over the top Hitchcockian female scream like in ‘Psycho’ or ‘Frenzy’ — it signals absolute horror but in this landscape, I felt it could accomplish that wink of satire,” Alloway said in emailed comments. The director also named “The Conjuring,” “Sinister” and “The Haunting of Hill House” among other visual and tonal inspirations.
While Shah isn’t a horror fan and could barely watch the reference material, she and the team were encouraged by the summer success of the film “Weapons.” (Coincidentally, the biggest horror hit this October — “The Black Phone 2” — is also phone-themed.) It took about three and a half weeks to get on set and it was a fairly quick shoot, allowing Hatch to launch the effort by mid October. Shah attributes the quick turnaround to a “scrappy team” that is able to quickly get approvals, like it did on a cheeky TikTok response to whacky claims that its product is demonic.
“We wanted to do something that felt like a bigger swing that could get some attention,” the executive said of the “Goodnight, Phone” effort. “There's always appetite at Hatch for those ideas, and I think we're really lucky that if we stumble on one, and there's enough momentum, we can go get it made without a ton of layers and approvals in the way.”
