Abstract Islamic symbolism has become a prominent feature of Indonesian horror film promotion, yet its market relevance depends on more than visual prominence because sacred cues may differ in semantic accuracy, ethical coherence, and contextual consistency. This study examines how Islamic Signifier Intensity and the Islamic Signifier Integrity Index are associated with theatrical audience performance, while also considering Established Market Recognition and Eid al-Fitr Release Timing as contextual market conditions. An exploratory secondary digital archival design was applied to fourteen Indonesian horror film campaigns released between 2022 and 2025 by coding official titles, posters, thumbnails, trailers, synopses, release metadata, and theatrical admissions through multimodal content analysis, rank-based comparison, permutation assessment, and contrasting-case interpretation. The results show a stable negative corpus-level association between signifier intensity and admissions, whereas established market recognition produced the strongest stable positive association; signifier integrity and Eid al-Fitr release timing retained positive but imprecise directions, while pre-release digital-attention metrics were excluded because comparable historical series could not be reproduced. The findings indicate that sacred-symbol visibility does not independently determine market performance and that credible symbolic use becomes strategically meaningful only when aligned with campaign coherence, audience familiarity, release conditions, and responsible marketing governance.
Affiliation: , Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Bandung, Indonesia Author Origin : Indonesia
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