A haunting tie-in, bedsheets included
A24 finds a spooky way to promote a new movie at A Ghost Store pop-up. Get it?
NEW YORK — The independent-film world is rife with ghosts, as anyone who has ever listened to a sales agent boast about the number of attendees at his screening can tell you.
On a Thursday night in Manhattan, however, the concept was taking a more literal form. The New York mini-studio A24 has established a pop-up called A Ghost Store, where guests can have a “meaningful reflection” as a spirit.
The store has been established to promote A24’s new Casey Affleck-Rooney Mara supernaturally tinged drama, “A Ghost Story,” proving that studios in these noisy times are finding increasingly novel ways to promote their films and also that every good marketing campaign begins with a pun.
In a front area, walls are emblazoned with maxims testing ghostly readiness. (“The transition from active participant to passive observer can be a difficult one. You must ask yourself if you are ready to transcend tangibility ad infinitum.”) Farther back, a closed-off room has been designed for more transmigratory purposes — participants can be “fitted” for a sheet, then sent into a hermetic space to play with other ghosts.
On this night, invited patrons filled out clipboard surveys asking about their “deepest curiosity,” “distant memory” and any “debts” they might hold before they passed into the great beyond. Sheet preferences were also requested, the supernatural by way of the high thread-count.
Guests were then taken, one or two at a time, into a soundproof room away from the reception by a beatific man dressed in all white. Identifying himself as Dylan, he spoke in disconcertingly soothing tones about one’s readiness for ghostly status as he draped thick, large sheets over participants. (The space is open to the public Thursdays through Sundays for the next several weeks.)
Dylan led the newly spirited by the front-train of their sheets — the outfit contained only narrow eyeholes; ghosts have little need for peripheral vision — into a well-lighted hall of mirrors where other ghosts were already present. (Said ghosts were human-sized mannequins with sheets draped over them. One hopes). As ethereal music played overhead, Dylan advised to “take as much time as you need” and closed the door. Reflection followed.
The project cements A24’s status as a company that takes as much of a curatorial approach to its marketing as to its movies (”Moonlight,” the upcoming “Menashe” and “Good Time”). It is the brainchild of Graham Retzik and Zoe Beyer, creative-marketing executives at the firm and overseers of many of its playful campaigns.
Beyer said she hoped the ghost store not only intrigued people about the new film but also provoked thoughts about their lives. She said she occasionally finds herself glued to a computer watching the livestream of people in the experience. (Yes, there’s a livestream; why should ghosts watch us but we not watch ghosts?)
Visiting the website can be its own form of spookiness. The site follows you around the Internet the way the brief search for that bread-maker on Amazon follows you — via creepily personal ads embedded into other sites. Only in this case, it doesn’t just replicate the search result but also asks why you’ve left (ghosted?) and engages in other forms of needy omnipotence, haunting us in other ways.
Directed by David Lowery (“Pete’s Dragon”), the metaphor-laden and often silence-filled “Ghost Story” examines a woman (Mara) who may or may not be haunted by her husband’s ghost. Lowery in the film uses sheets as a kind of lowtech literalization of the concept, the ghosts not just figments of the mind but also actors in Casperian costumes.
Reactions by people in the Ghost Store room can vary. Some dance, some cry, some take selfies. The links to the film may seem subtextual, but the director said he found the project apt.
“The film was intended to give people space to think not only about the story but how the themes relate to them,” Lowery, who donned a sheet and appears in the movie as a ghost-extra himself, said at the event. “My hope is that, while regarding the images in here, minds can wander in a way that is complementary to what I’m trying to do with the movie.”
Then the director drifted out among other attendees, like them wondering what lay beyond the open wine bar.