"After the sex wave the hex wave?": the German marketing of MARK OF THE DEVIL

This article examines the German marketing campaign of MARK OF THE DEVIL using the example of two advertisements. The film suffered from a sustained conflict between Michael Armstrong and Adrian Hoven, who both asserted their claims to creative control. The dispute over the movie’s authorship left traces in an article published by the regional daily Stuttgarter Zeitung based on a longer advertisement commissioned by distribution company Gloria. The Filmmuseum Düsseldorf preserves a significantly modified version of this advertisement; both texts and their promotional rhetoric are analysed at length. These written marketing materials accentuate features such as historical authenticity, excessive sexualised violence, star appeal, (trans-­)nationality and topicality. Actually, the film was promoted as a fictional response to purported contemporary witch cults in Germany and the UK. Furthermore, the partial and ridiculed reprint of the original text in the newspaper illustrates distribution companies’ great difficulty in obtaining press coverage of exploitation pictures. The article argues that the advertisements’ striking incoherence results from the attempt to target audiences with different interests by trying to appeal in divergent ways that could motivate cinema-goers to purchase a ticket. The article concludes by recognising the predominant role of extreme violence in the marketing strategy as a means of product differentiation.