A number of people have alerted me to this news: a guy created a website to pitch his movie… and it worked. LAObserved has the story.
Screenwriter Eric Heisserer set up a
website called The Dionaea House
last year and posted a series of correspondence between characters in his horror
screenplay. After all, if the Internet is there, why not exploit it to create
some buzz? The site got a ton of hits. Tomorrow’s Hollywood
Reporter says the website helped "build the mythology" of the project — and
Warner Bros. Pictures picked it up for David Heyman to produce at Heyday Films.
It’s true that the website helped create some buzz, but Eric’s a friend, and having read the script, I think I can say safely it was the script that sold the script, rather than the site.
Got to give Eric Heisserer a lot of credit. In this field you got make your own luck, and he certainly did that.