Cloverfield Update

New viral marketing material has been released for Cloverfield before it's opening next weekend. I was skeptical about their validity, whether they were fakes by some crazed fan or released by the studio. But then I saw the new snapshot on 1-18-08.com. These guys...genius.

It's a great idea. In an age when information is so readily accessible, they've taken the opposite approach. Instead of flooding the Internet with info on the film, they present a plausible challenge. Instead of having everything on www.cloverfieldmovie.com, they scatter it everywhere, and mostly cloaked.

You want to know more info about it? Start digging.

After people have invested their time and energy into the movie, their personal "dedication", for lack of a better term, is only made more concrete.

There are several "newscasts" on the collapse of the Tagruato oil rig. It would have been a blast to play the reporter, seeing as that is my field of study. Check them out on Cloverfield's Daily Motion page. Most of them are in different languages.

Here is what we know already about the monster. It is a large, probably reptilian creature, but not Godzilla (see my previous post). There are probably smaller creatures, or some kind of infection or infestation. We see one of the girls with slashes on her arm, presumably from an animal. We see rats evacuating the subway in this trailer from Movieweb.

UPDATE 11 JAN: I read a couple articles that confirm some of what we've said here. If you don't want some BIG SPOILERS, let's just suffice it to say that some of what we've been speculating is right. How's that for a vague update? If you really want to know, you can read the articles yourself.
Cloverfield Production Notes
Interview with director Matt Reeves



We hear what sounds like a smaller creature, maybe flapping wings, in the first trailer that was released.

There is speculation about the monster being a mutated person. Check out one of the viral sites, jamieandteddy.com. Password "jllovesth". The site has video letters from Jamie to her boyfriend Teddy, who is an activist fighting Tagruato's polution of the ocean. Through the course of the videos, we see that Teddy stops responding to Jamie's calls, that he sends her a strange substance that says "Don't Eat!", and she assumes he is cheating on her. He also sends a tape saying that he has been found by Tagruato, and that he won't be able to respond, they are holding him prisoner, essentially. She gets mad and eats the stuff he said don't eat. She starts to act weird.

From obnoxious dumb girl to giant terrorizing monster? Maybe. We'll see.