Another ad that played like a fully-formed horror narrative, delivering chills, tension and a devious twist all in less than a minute, was "Lure", an entry into the "Princess of Darkness" campaign for coffee liqueur brand Tia Maria. Much like Toyota's "Earthly Pleasure" MR2 Roadster ad, it arrived at the cusp of the Y2K, a time when I was particularly susceptible to the miniature nightmares that seemed to stalk the avenues of late night television. "Lure" was directed by Walter Stern, better known for his work helming music videos for David Bowie, The Prodigy and Massive Attack, and starred actor Stephen Dorff, playing a fashionable Hollywood pin-up who might as well be himself. He falls under the spell of a supernatural seductress whom I take to be the personification of the beverage being touted (although the liqueur itself also features as a central prop in her baleful ritual), and for this reason I shall refer to her as "Tia Maria".
"Lure" opens with an ad-within-an-ad; Dorff's mug gazes out from the pages of a trendy magazine, before we cut to reveal what the Hollywood heartthrob is up to in the present moment, nonchalantly browsing a downtown newsstand in the dead of night while attempting to strike up a perfunctory conversation with the indifferent vendor. All of a sudden he's been gripped by a force well beyond his comprehension, causing him to discard his coffee and the conversation and embark on a perilous journey into the ill-lit regions of the city. He seems totally numb to everything stirring in his immediate surroundings, be it the agitated German Shepherd dog that lunges at him from behind a fence (producing a harsh burst of noise in an otherwise eerily muted soundscape) or the mysterious female silhouette observing him from a distance as he approaches Tia Maria's apartment building. It was this specific detail that most spooked me at the time. It's not obvious what her presence has to do with anything - whether she is an associate of Tia Maria's, tasked with overseeing Dorff's arrival, a prospective predator eyeing him in accordance with her own agenda, or a casual bystander showing fleeting and harmless curiosity as he wanders past. All we can conclude is that she seems quite at ease in the darkness. To my mind, she's a scarier figure than the central Tia, for the way she hints at a larger narrative that's permitted to remain predominantly in the shadows, out of both sight and apprehension. There is an entire nocturnal underbelly at work within the streets of Los Angeles, although what it's actually up to is anybody's guess. Stern's direction captures that seedier side of the city, depicting it as not only grungy and forbidding, but ghoulish and uncanny. The trail of papers that litter Dorff's pathway and the graffiti-strewn walls in the backdrop seem indicative not of negligence and social disorder, but the aftermath of some kind of ruinous fury that's been manifesting off of screen. According to the ad's writer, Mike Boles, "Lure" took several cues from trends in contemporary psychological thrillers (it even shares some spatial DNA with David Fincher's Se7en, the apartment where Tia Maria resides having been used for the hotel scenes in that film), and there is something slickly cinematic in how it lays down its hypnotically hair-raising atmosphere, enticing us through an urban wilderness that's as treacherous and uncharted as any backwoods. The light featured throughout the ad, far from staving off the oppressiveness of the darkness, has a sickly, unnatural quality that offers little refuge. Even the characters lurking in its green, insectocutor glow have a ghostly inertia to them - the exchange between Dorff and the magazine vendor (the ad's only dialogue) is stilted and mechanical, suggesting that the two have little genuine interest in one another. It's as if the denizens already occupy a sleeping walking trance from which Tia's spell momentarily awakens Dorff, compelling him, however unwittingly, to look the true face of his environs directly in the eye. The visual punchline, revealing why Tia has summoned Dorff, provides a humorous tension diffuser, but one that does not entirely offset that sense of omnipresent menace.
The
expectation the ad sets up, and then deftly subverts, is that Tia's
interests in Dorff must be rooted in some malefic sexual appetite. Her cravings turn out to be for something else entirely - she's called
Dorff in so that he can unfasten the lid on her pickle jar, after
which she releases him from his trance and sends him on his way. There does still seem to be a lascivious
subtext in terms of how her interactions with Dorf have played out - he's
been objectified, lured in purely for the use of his body and then
aloofly discarded - but one that's comically at odds with the sheer
mundaneness of what she actually wants from the arrangement. "Lure" might just have functioned just as convincingly as an advertisement for a brand of pickles, but for the deliberate squeamishness of their inclusion. I've no doubt that
pickles were chosen as the item of her fancy (as opposed to eggs or olives) so as to
work in the additional gag of her chomping on a phallic object, a sly
final signifier of her mastery over the stupefied Dorff. Whether we're to
assume that Tia, for all her occult prowess, was unable to open that pesky jar
herself, or was too idle to do so, the
implication is that she's been browsing magazines for a desirable
(and entirely disposable) personal jar opener in which the same
manner as Dorff himself was scanning the newsstand for midnight reading material. Her readiness to entrance and employ unwary souls on such casual whims registers as both spooky and seductively admirable.
Above all, "Lure" seems fixated on the notion of gaze and with the perils of inviting it. People certainly notice Dorff as he weaves his way through the streets of Los Angeles toward Tia's apartment - a fellow nocturnal wanderer glances his way as he passes, and the distant silhouette takes an obvious interest in him. It's as if Dorff is perpetually being watched, by an audience to which he remains largely oblivious, and it's his status as a Hollywood hotshot that has made him so vulnerable; his willingness to live such an exposed existence is precisely what brings him to the manipulative attentions of Tia Maria. "Lure" leans into that idea of celebrities becoming flesh and blood advertisements, modelling a lifestyle and a set of aspirations that members of public are encouraged to emulate, but purports to put empowerment firmly in the hands of the onlooker. The celebrity becomes public property, a plaything to be bent and molded as the consumer pleases, while the elusive Tia lives the truly aspirational life, which involves being able to summon celebrities to do her menial bidding at a simple twirl of her fingers. The subversiveness of "Lure" lies in the insinuation that it is not Dorff's sex appeal per se that's being used to make the pivotal beverage look enticing, but the tantalizing cunning with which Tia is able to take advantage of him. The message, then, is that light is not your friend - the shadows may be foreboding, but they offer a wicked prosperity for those who are able to reside there.
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