The Strain Will Replace Eyeball Billboards That Freaked Out Children And Pansies
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We hear The Strain billboard is too creepy for people driving by…what do you think? Accident waiting to happen? pic.twitter.com/Tm7ZAQcmap
— Save Horror™ (@savehorror) June 28, 2014
Once again, the public’s largely asinine opinion over what kids should and shouldn’t be able to see has reached an eye-level fever pitch, and it’s all thanks to some crafty billboards for FX’s upcoming horror series The Strain. Created by Guillermo del Toro and his Strain trilogy co-author Chuck Hogan, the series involves a vampiric virus taking over New York City. Some of the infected are rats, and the TV and Internet promos have utilized the whole “rat tail coming out of an eyeball” thing to great effect. But stick that same image on a public billboard and…
(brains of parents everywhere exploding in misdirected anger)
God forbid these parents and their children saw this billboard on the way to the theater to watching something like Transformers: Age of Extinction or a Marvel superhero movie, where getting a rat tail in the eye would be preferable to being one of millions of bystanders killed in the massively violent city-destroying sequences that all of those movies have.
In any case, the backlash got back to FX quick and in a hurry, thanks to anger-fueling social media sites like Twitter, and the marketing team is now in the process of removing those billboards/posters and replacing them with other more sanitary imagery. We all know the horror genre is chockfull of innocence and safety, especially one as dark as The Strain looks to be. I grew up on horror, and yes, it scared me as a child. So the fuck what? I’d rather be scared by a billboard than scared that some kid is going to randomly walk into a school and shoot everyone. (But wait, that second fear is actually reasonable.)
Anyway, America has enough problems that me shitting on its backbone probably doesn’t help anyone, so let’s get back to remembering what that eyeball was promoting. The Strain stars Corey Stoll as a CDC specialist sent to investigate a strain of vampirism in New York City, while David Bradley plays a pawn-shop owner and former professor who has some background knowledge of the outbreak, which is basically the blood-red carpet for the arrival of the Master (Robert Maillet), one of the oldest vampires in the world. And as you can imagine, shit gets hectic pretty quickly.
Below is the longest trailer The Strain has released. Cover your eyes if you’re a wuss, though, and then give yourself a swirly.
Expect to find new visual aids for The Strain soon, followed by its FX debut on Sunday, July 13.
What do you guys think about the billboard? Am I overreacting or is everyone else?
