Scary site dares you stay at haunted hotels

If there's one thing I hate it's a holiday-themed brief for a brand. But if there's one thing I absolutely love, it's movie poster design. Summing a whole movie up in a static graphic form, booking.com made a fantastic site that merges content, technology and design in a totally appropriate way.

W+K Amsterdam commissioned illustrator Akiko Stehrenberger to create horror movie style posters for booking.com's seven most haunted hotels. The campaign idea? 'Stay if you dare'. There's a TV commercial and printed posters were rolled out in movie-theatre lobbies just before Halloween, but the campaign lost nothing in its digital translation.

The site is all beautifully rendered HTML5 and scrolls upwards. The URL lets you know you are at booking.com rather than a movie site and each hotel has a direct link to its booking page and also social buttons.

Edu Pou, W+K head of creative innovation, explains the idea of 'stay if you dare', saying, "It's as integrated as it gets. The TV ad teases and defines the mood, the print intrigues and shows range, and the microsite is the ultimate interactive experience."

Words: Ros Horner

Ros is a senior designer at digital agency SapientNitro. Based in London, she spends her days designing websites and apps, and her nights trying not to look at a computer. This article originally appeared in net magazine issue 250.