Dark Skies trailer and viral marketing

On Feb. 22, The Weinstein Co. will release Dark Skies, starring Keri Russell and Josh Hamilton as a suburban couple whose lives get really, really difficult. That’s a large part of all we know about the film, whose secrecy has been turned into a shell game.

Enter two new sources of information: the film’s trailer and the website YouHaveBeenChosen.org, which is part of an interactive marketing push to scare and intrigue audiences without quite telling them what to be scared, or intrigued, by.

On the site, users are prompted to allow access to their Facebook accounts, from which a “file” is created, revealing “you” as a target of “them,” complete with arcane symbols and skeletal scans and the general sense that someone is about to be probed.

Officially, this doesn’t give the audience enough information to go, “A-ha!”

But then there’s the issue of the film’s trailer, in which we learn that Russell and Hamilton play suburban parents with two children. Slowly, and then all at once, their world gets cracked open: objects begin rearranging themselves in the family home; flocks of birds fly headfirst into every window; the bodies of their children keep coming up branded.

This is par for the course for a film from the “producers of Paranormal Activity and Insidious,” as the trailer touts. Cute kids. Malevolent spirit. Probably unhappy ending. Except: as the final seconds of the trailer give away, Dark Skies isn’t just a feint as a title. The film is about aliens! (Probably!)

It also includes at least one scene of Russell — possessed? probed? — banging her head against a pane of glass until it begins to shatter.

Check out the trailer below and then click over to YouHaveBeenChosen.org and let us know: Is the secret out? And does that make you more excited for the movie?

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