Entertainment

Snakes on a Plane opens in theaters this week, but out on the Web it opened months ago and has been building, getting bigger, spawning tributes and sequels ever since.

Next time you see the phrase "viral marketing" or hear someone exclaiming about new media paradigms, instead of hitting your inner snooze button just think Snakes on a Plane.

The power of those four words has driven this project from another horror-suspense film released as trashy late-summer fun to a full-blown, multimedia phenomenon. The title alone was enough to get Samuel L. Jackson to sign on and to inspire a spontaneous community of online support, such as www.SnakesOnaBlog.com, the site started by Brian Finkelstein. The first-year law student at Georgetown University started the blog to chronicle his quest to be invited to the premiere of this film called Snakes on a Plane.

"That title just hits you; everything you need to know is there," Mr. Finkelstein says by phone from Los Angeles, where he flew to attend tonight's premiere – he got his invitation.

"As soon as you hear it, the movie starts playing in your head. Snakes, a plane, Samuel L. Jackson – bang, that's all you need."

Photo illustration: Natalie Caudill/DMN and Troy Oxford/DMN

Be careful. That headset you grab might be a snake.

His blog, which he started in January and quickly turned into a centralized clearinghouse for SOAP, is just the tip of the cyberberg. For months, mock trailers, parodic short films and sequel concepts have been pinging around the Web. Trailers with titles such as "Steaks on a Train" and "Snakes Who Missed the Plane" have been playing in heavy rotation on video sites such as YouTube.com.

New Line Cinema has tapped into all this fan-driven frenzy. The movie's official Web site, www.SnakesOnAPlane.com, features all sorts of links designed to fan the phenomenon's flames. There is the link allowing you to decorate your MySpace page with SOAP images. There is a link to a feature that lets you customize a voice message from Samuel L. Jackson and send it to a friend. Another link ranks "Fan Site of the Week" so you can click on the latest online tributes to the hottest movie no one has seen. There, you will find, for instance, a script generator where you can offer lines of dialogue and an audience participation prompter that offers suggested lines to yell out at particular moments during the movie.

Another innovative marketing gambit the studio used to spread the SOAP virus was an online contest in which people created and submitted songs, with the winner appearing on the soundtrack. ("Snakes on a Brain" by Captain Ahab was the winner, if you're keeping score.)

The result of all this is that since word of the title leaked out at the beginning of the year, fans have been making trailers, writing dialogue, brainstorming sequels, scoring the soundtrack and, most important, promoting a movie that none of them has seen.

Is it any wonder that the studio announced in mid-July that it wouldn't be screening the film for critics? Why bother? This ain't Citizen Kane . Even the most optimistic of SOAP lovers is hoping for a so-bad-it's-good experience. For genre films such as horror and action that often are dismissed or maligned by critics, the Internet is the new promotional medium and fans are a self-deputized brigand of citizen marketers.

Still, all the revolutionary buzz aside, could all this have happened without that irresistibly brilliant-idiotic title? For a time, the title was rumored to have been changed to Pacific Air Flight 121, but the cyberswell of outrage quickly nixed that. It's hard to imagine Pride and Prejudice or A Passage to India inspiring the same sort of worldwide Web of silly fun.

In which case we better be braced for a whole lot of snakes and spiders and maybe sharks in our future.

E-mail tmaurstad@dallasnews.com