14 Movie Trailers That Misled Audiences

The marketing of the documentary from 2010 Catfish suggests that the film is horror. The trailer essentially shows a found footage horror movie – a group of friends, happy and smiling, pack their film gear, go on a road trip, discover something is wrong, investigate, and eventually things turn chaotic. There is even a quote from a critic in the trailer who compared the film to Hitchcock movies.

While Catfish is suspenseful, it is far from horror. The film was released right in the middle of the found footage era, just a few years after Paranormal activity and Cloverfieldand two years before Chronicle. Either the marketing team wanted to appeal to that kind of audience, or they intentionally misled us to replicate what happens to the filmmakers in the documentary. Either way, it worked. The film was a critical and commercial success, and it even launched a television series of the same name.