Spiral: From The Book of Saw Gets ‘Hacked’ In Bizarrely Hilarious Viral Marketing Campaign

Spiral: From the Book of Saw will bring the SAW movie franchise back to theaters this month, and to drum up hype for the film, Lionsgate Pictures is launching a truly bizarre and hilarious viral marketing campaign over Twitter. The campaign has taken the form of the official Spiral Twitter account seemingly locked in a game of extortion with the “saw quotes” Twitter account, in which the latter has been threatening to embarrass the former unless some checks for promotional work and marketing are finally paid by the studio. To make good on the threat, the saw quotes account has “hacked” the Spiral account, and this is the haunting result:

So there you are: now that you’ve seen this sexy hunk version of the Jigsaw doll, it is impossible to unsee. In response to these “threats,” the official Spiral Twitter account has tried both bargaining and threatening the “hacker” behind the saw quotes account to stop these extortion attempts: “Please cease and desist immediately. If you do not we will be forced to take legal action.” However, this hacker isn’t playing games.

In a more recent post, the saw quotes hacker demonstrated that he/she has access to the official Spiral movie file on the Lionsgate computers – and could delete it at any moment. The threat came with a warning: “I would be careful @Saw
. I have access to more than just your precious Twitter account. If you do not cooperate… things may spiral even further out of your control.”

So far, this little “game” between SAW social media accounts has done its job. The Spiral account posted a fake “warning” to fans, stating: “We apologize for our latest tweet, we believe our social media account has been compromised and we’re working on a solution.”

That “warning” certainly got attention, and helped the next phase of the “game”: a SAW trivia challenge:

So, the question now is: do you want to play?

As a lot of SAW fans are saying, this is one of the more unique and creative (and downright fun) viral marketing campaigns we’ve seen in a while. It’s a good reminder of what “normal” used to be for marketing and releasing big movies. It’s good to be back.

Spiral will be in theaters on May 14th.