Screamfest: House of Curses


Client

The Kraken Rum

Services

PR

Experiential
Design
Content
Social


Results

41

Press articles

750+

Guests

2.9M

Social media reach

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Screamfest: House of Curses Exhibition

The Brief

After seven successful years of Kraken’s annual Screamfest, in 2024, we were challenged with the idea of switching Screamfest up, heading back to the event’s roots and applying a fresh take. Screamfest had previously welcomed people into the Kraken brand world, but in order to recruit even more newcomers, we needed to place The Beast at the heart of THEIR world. We were challenged to conceive an idea that hit all the usual touchpoints – earned media, social, regional, experiential and Kraken’s membership platform, The League of Darkness, with the additional goal of bringing more people through the door than ever before.

Ruth Millington

The Big Idea

Moving away from physical thrills to explore more psychological scares, this Screamfest, we opened the world’s most haunted gallery. House of Curses brought together cursed artwork, photographs and objects known to have inflicted terror and suffering on their owners and artists alike, for an uncomfortably unnerving exhibition.

 

Split into free daytime walk-in sessions and paid ticketed evening events to generate as much through-traffic as possible, we welcomed guests into the exhibition in the heart of Soho. Curated by an expert art critic and historian, the gallery was split into seven sections, with themes including Cursed Creatures, Ghosts, Skeletons and Haunted Toys. Guests received an audioguide narrating their journey through the 30+ haunted artworks and artefacts on show, and had to sign a waiver before entering the most haunted exhibit of all – a charity shop painting which had previously gone viral after inflicting all manner of horrors on its owners.

 

Post-exhibition, guests found themselves in the Kraken bar, where there was a brand new menu of haunting Kraken cocktails, ensuring the brand was at the forefront of all visitors’ experiences.

 

Alongside the London-based event, to ensure Screamfest still engaged with regions outside of the capital, we created two ‘haunted videos in Edinburgh’s South Bridge Vaults and a nunnery in Malvern. Each video haunting was coupled with a remedy tonic cocktail, to protect viewers against impending curses.

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The Results

We had more consumers through the door than any other Screamfest with over 750 guests. Of those, around 600 were paid tickets and the remainder daytime walk-ins, who heard about the event through a combination of word-of-mouth, press coverage and social ads.

 

We secured over 40 pieces of coverage, including top tier nationals like Mail Online and Metro, as well as key listings titles such as London on the Inside and Secret London.

 

Across socials, over 25 pieces of influencer and UGC content were created, and alongside our own channels, saw an average engagement rate of over 7%. Total social reach landed at 2.9 million, with over 5,000 click-throughs on our dark posts, which led to event tickets selling out in less than an hour every time new tickets were released.

Screamfest: House of Curses
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