South Korean eyewear label Gentle Monster has unveiled “The Hunt,” a one-minute short that frames Hunter Schafer as a contemporary “scream queen,” setting the tone for the brand’s Fall 2025 campaign.
Horror-Tinged Film Anchors Fall 2025 Launch
The film, released in the run-up to Halloween, is directed by Nadia Lee Cohen and situates Schafer in an eerily immaculate suburb where menace arrives with a doorbell chime and a knife through the front door. The brand calls the piece a “fever dream,” underscoring its blend of glossy fashion imagery and classic horror grammar.
In the opening, a blinking eye widens the viewer’s gaze to a masked onlooker filming Schafer as she dances at home, before a pursuit spills from living room to lawn to car. Midway, a mask is lifted to reveal Schafer’s own face, heightening the uncanniness and inviting readings of doubled identity. The visual language nods to 1990s slasher tropes, think Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, but rendered with Cohen’s saturated, cinematic polish.
Nadia Lee Cohen’s Direction and Visual Language
Cohen’s authorship is central. Known for stylized worlds that fuse glamour with unease, her direction brings a heightened suburban palette to Gentle Monster’s campaign, casting Schafer in a sequined red slip and minimalist eyewear while the camera prowls like an unseen antagonist. The pacing and framing deliver a refined horror pastiche, unfolding in a controlled minute that privileges mood, mise-en-scène, and product placement over dialogue.
The partnership fits both artists’ trajectories. Cohen’s fashion-film credentials and affinity for hyper-real, Lynch-adjacent tableaux meet Schafer’s ongoing crossover between fashion and screen performance. The film’s suburban nightmare lens offers a familiar but freshly packaged entry point for seasonal brand storytelling, turning the eyewear drop into a pop-culture moment with high rewatch value across social platforms where the spot has been teased and reposted.
Minimalist Eyewear And Release Timeline
Beyond its mood, “The Hunt” previews the campaign’s product direction: slimmer silhouettes, refined detailing, and clean lines that temper the label’s more sculptural signatures. Trade and style outlets describe the range as a move toward minimalist, slim-framed shapes and metallic accents, an edit that aligns the on-screen styling with the brand’s evolving design language for the season.
The project rolled out as a timed sequence: social posts flagged the short’s October 29 debut window, followed by the collection’s retail launch on November 7. That cadence, film first, retail second, is supported by official brand posts and campaign coverage, positioning content as the engine for commerce while giving audiences a clear runway from teaser to product availability. Gentle Monster has also tied the drop to an interactive game, extending the campaign’s narrative into an immersive experience for fans.
Fandom And Brand Strategy Around The Campaign
For Gentle Monster, the move continues a strategy of treating product launches like cultural events, using auteur-driven shorts to refresh brand codes and pull in fashion, film, and beauty communities. The one-minute format favors repeat viewing, platform portability, and creator commentary, an especially potent mix when fronted by Schafer, whose crossover profile bridges prestige TV, cinema, and luxury fashion. The brand’s own channels amplified the drop, concisely crediting Schafer and Cohen while emphasizing the filmic conceit.
Critically, this horror-inflected turn does more than chase a seasonal trend. The tight narrative doubles as a live-action lookbook, weaving close-ups of frames into a story about surveillance, doubling, and flight. That construct supports a broader push toward cleaner, “simple” lines without relinquishing the label’s signature surrealism. As a result, the campaign lands at the intersection of cinematic craft and commercial clarity, with the product’s design updates legible inside a scene viewers are likely to replay.