Conspiracy Theory Website for Bugonia Calls Back to a Different Time on the Internet

The trailer for the upcoming Yorgos Lanthimos movie, Bugonia, situates itself firmly in the present, as it features pharma CEO Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) singing along with Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” But a promotional website for the movie is a true blast from the past.

Navigate over to Human Resistance HQ and you’ll find a site that is apparently the work of Teddy, a conspiracy theory addict played by Jesse Plemons in the film. There you’ll be greeted not by modern website design (nor, blessedly, with ads for credit cards or sports gambling). Instead you’ll see mostly black space, basic fonts, and a janky comment field.

The Human Resistance HQ is right out of an earlier era of the internet, and not just in terms of movie marketing. Studios have been using the internet to advertise since 1994’s Stargate, and has sometimes created some pretty impressive experiences. Fans of The Batman, who do in the Penguin’s words “habla Español,” can check out https://www.rataalada.com to contact the Riddler. If the giant locusts in Jurassic World: Dominion left you disappointed, you can go to https://www.dinotracker.com to see where the dinosaurs were while that movie was wasting your time.

But as fun as these throwbacks are, this new Bugonia oddity very much remind us of a different time in the internet, back when the web was more of a free for all and not homogenized. Sure that meant surfers saw a lot of “under construction” sprites and had to navigate through so many frames. But it also meant that we got lots of weird and wonderful things, especially when it came to movies. Take, for example, the original website for The Blair Witch Project (now available only through Internet Archive). The sparse site, consisting mostly of a black background and a few links highlighted in white, provides information about the myth of the witch and the ill-fated filmmakers. It reinforces the play between fact and fiction that makes the movie so powerful, and caused more than a few folks to believe the horror flick was a real doomed documentary.

The Human Resistance HQ site continues in this tradition. Devoid of any indication that it’s a promotion for an upcoming film, the site consists solely of information about Andromedans, an alien race that Teddy is convinced is coming to invade Earth. Furthermore the site presents evidence that Fuller is one of the Andromedans, citing her “Narrow feet” and “High hair density.” To back up the author’s claims, the site includes copies of articles about Fuller, which explain the work in genetics done by her company Auxolith and the privacy scandals surrounding her project. Its so well-made in its amteurish nature, in fact, that an unsuspecting user could stumble upon it and mistake it for something real.

Which is fitting for Bugonia. A remake of the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia is the latest outré outing from Lanthimos, who followed up his Academy Award-winning hit Poor Things with the decidedly off-putting Kinds of Kindness. One might think that he would try to recover some of the goodwill garnered by his first couple collaboration with Stone, which includes The Favourite, but if its website is any indication, Bugonia will be another oddity—and the internet is better for it.

Bugonia leaps into theaters on Oct. 24, 2025.