MTV has been promoting Scream since last year, when they announced the show with a creepy tweet and Snapchat story. The show finally premieres next Tuesday and MTV is continuing its social push by partnering with Interlude, a media tech company, for an interactive game.
Fans will have a chance to play Choose Your Own Murder on the dedicated website. A video plays with options to make decisions about how to get away from the killer. A noise downstairs? Fans have to decide whether to go check it out or ignore it and then it’s on.
All along, Scream has been promoted by getting viewers as involved as possible. They pushed a promo video featuring stars from other popular MTV shows that drove 4.3 million views, 1 million of which occurred in the first hour after its release across social channels. The Facebook account has quadrupled its followers since then. The original announcement for the show was a made via a tweet and Snapchat message with emojis and a phone number they could call. The number led to a prerecorded message from the classic killer voice. There were about 20,000 phone calls.
Scream has always been about mocking horror films as much as its been about being a little scary and the social push for the show plays on that idea. The games are a good way to get people playing with the show on the Internet, but Internet games are fleeting. The trick will be to keep viewers interested online and over the air each week this summer, which MTV is pretty good at. Other shows like Teen Wolf and Finding Carter do well on Twitter each week according to Nielsen Social. Here’s hoping kids still like scary movies.