Today’s Movie Trailer: A Scary Viral Campaign for Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim

Look out, San Francisco. The new marketing campaign for Guillermo Del Toro’s 2013 aliens-versus-robots movie Pacific Rim takes a scary look at news reports about the city under siege, as monsters surge below the Golden Gate Bridge. The “breaking news” of a “kaiju attack”—”kaiju” means “monster” in Japanese—gives fans of the Pan’s Labyrinth director their first glimpse at his next creepy creatures, albeit a brief glimpse in Cloverfield-style shaky camera shots.

(MORE: 10 Questions for Guillermo del Toro)

But the teaser campaign doesn’t stop there. The movie’s viral marketing website, under the aegis of something called the Pan Pacific Defense Corps, comes complete with a Kaiju Emergency Alert System, links to the specs for a Jaeger (German for “hunter), the giant human-controlled robots used to fight off the kaijus, and a mysterious countdown. Pacific Rim is due in theaters July 12, 2013.