Cloverfield 2 Teaser Video, Or Just Clever Ruse?

By Akela Talamasca on August 27th, 2009

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A new video has hit that’s caused some speculation about its possible tie to the hand-held cinema verité monster movie “Cloverfield”. The clip certainly follows the format exhibited by the first film: shaky camera work of a normal, innocuous urban scene, with seemingly unrelated material (a father with a newborn baby) “accidentally” spliced in. In the final seconds of the clip, deep booming sounds are heard, and a shot of the sky is (possibly) obscured by a mass of mpeg artifacts that could suggest a monstrous face, with the baby superimposed over that.

Finally, the camera view swings wildly about, suggesting its handler is running in panic, and a street sign with the name “Cloverfield” briefly flashes by before it all goes to black.

Now, the writer of the referring article seems to be saying that putting the word “Cloverfield” in the video is “too obvious” to be considered true viral marketing. I disagree. You can’t pull the same trick that the first movie pulled; the audience is too savvy to be fooled twice. Putting the name right in the video tells us that we can expect more of the same kind of hand-held camera work that we got from the first film. It’s more honest marketing than we might be used to, but I think that’s a better direction than trying to achieve the same effect with an increasingly jaded audience.

Also, letting the camera linger on the triceratops seems to straight-up tell us that this is about a monster. The woman’s voice speaking a non-English language suggests a broader geographical scope than the original flick. The man with his newborn implies both something new, and also a different group of human subjects, which is a good thing; I got tired of the young hipsters of the first movie pretty quickly. If the subjects this next time around are a family, that could add just the right level of threat to make this even more interesting.

Time will tell, of course, but I’m going to weigh in and say that this could very well be marketing for “Cloverfield 2″. You can watch the clip below: