If someone asked me what I am missing most about going to the cinema, I would say “the trailers”. In case you somehow don’t know, trailers are advertisements for upcoming releases that hopefully pique your interest enough to watch the film when it eventually comes out. They’ve been on VHS tapes, and on DVDs where they still reside today, with the addition of another home known as the internet. It’s been going on for years with varying degrees of success. So do trailers pique our interest? How do they do it? Do they give too much of the film away, or mislead you? Or in some cases, is the trailer more enjoyable than the film itself? Clearly beloved by people all over the world, and saving us from seeing the occasional bad films, let’s hope so.
It’s only right to begin with the teaser trailer. Teasers use a minimal number of images to make you interested in the film. A key example I can personally provide is Skyfall. I had no idea what the film was about, I only had blink-and-you-miss-it shots of a one man I couldn’t get a good look at – until it’s revealed to be Daniel Craig. The music turns to singular booming sounds as the images show us some action, along with some minor details. Then the title SKYFALL comes on screen, and just to confirm our suspicions the last thing we see are the numbers 007. I’m officially interested in seeing it.
Then usually a few months after the teaser, the main trailer will make an appearance. The main trailer takes some stuff from the teaser along with new footage, and now we have an idea of who the cast are, who the noteworthy people behind the camera are, and what the plot is. Most seem to find a balance of showing enough to make us want to see it, but not spoiling anything important. Examples of this include the Alien trailer where the visuals get more intense, as does the wailing sound in the background. When it’s finished, we know that it’s a sci-fi film about a titular alien that picks off a crew one by one, and we also know that in space no one can hear you scream.
Another example of an excellent trailer is be Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Set to some innocent music, it shows Hitch walking round some of the film’s key locations and he talks in some detail about disturbing events that took place there. It all ends on the title and the ionic ‘shower scene’ score along a glimpse of a girl in the shower, (who is meant to be Janet Leigh but really Vera Miles).
Christopher Nolan’s trailers also keep things as spoiler-free as possible. By the end of his trailers we know that the likes of the Joker and Bane will be bringing chaos to Gotham, or a man with a strong southern accent will be going into space, or that you can do some very colourful things in dreams set to bombastic music. As for Dunkirk, he really couldn’t spoil anything we didn’t already see coming.
Then there’s the opposite of a good trailer, the kind that ruins everything and removes any reason for seeing the final product. Examples include Castaway, which shows that Tom Hanks makes it on to a plane and back home. Terminator Salvation and Genisys both give away their twists in the trailers, as a man who was supposedly human is revealed to be a terminator in Salvation, and John Connor is shown to have become a Terminator in Genisys. So when it actually happens in the film itself there is little pay-off or emotional investment.
Then there are the ‘let’s just show all the good scenes’ type of trailers, for example The Amazing Spider-Man 2 which hides nothing of importance – including the last shot in the film. Not a good trailer, Sony, I hope you improve in the future.
Sometimes a trailer can be promising, but when we go to the film it fails to be as attention grabbing. Examples include Godzilla (1998), which uses only an old man fishing, followed by city-wide destruction, some glimpses of the monster, and wraps up with a giant eye looking at the camera. Impressive – but the film itself received poor reviews and a planned sequel was cancelled. Just over a year later something similar happened with The Phantom Menace. It showed some lightsabre fights, clone troopers, old and new characters – including a pre-pubescent Darth Vader. It all looked so good and then… I don’t think I have to tell you what the reaction was, the Star Wars fandom has done it for me.
At the end of the line we have trailers that are downright misleading. Once again, it all looks interesting, nothing bad to report, but when you see the film there is a distinct lack of what the trailers put such an emphasis on. Examples include Godzilla (2014), where the trailer just had to include Bryan Cranston… well, he’s in it, but he’s not there at the end. A more recent example would be Suicide Squad that seemed to present the idea that the Joker played by Jared Leto would play a big part in the story. Again, he’s in it, but his screen time is sporadic. The film was okay at best, but the lack of Joker left many people disappointed.
With the creation of the internet, trailers tend to make their debuts on websites like YouTube and the responses can be huge, but it depends on how much the given film is being anticipated. By the time the trailers reach the cinema, millions have already seen them and many will have made review, reaction and breakdown videos of them.
Trailers for highly anticipated films have also been shown to be good marketing ploys for TV. If you announce during your sport game, or not very interesting award show, that an anticipated trailer is going to play at some point you can sometimes expect the audience numbers to skyrocket. It is manipulative, of course, but those who waited will get the trailer that they have been waiting for.
Apart from scenes from the film, what else goes into a trailer to make it work? The preferred option is music that goes along with the tone of the trailer. It can be a piece of instrumental music like Clint Mansell’s Lux Aeterna or John Murphy’s Sunshine. Or if the trailer has a dark tone, you can remix a well-known song to make it just as moody and depressing. Examples include Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall Part 2 for The New Mutants, and Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World for Geostorm. This doesn’t just apply to genres like disaster and horror, remember the choir cover of Radiohead’s Creep for The Social Network, it works just as well.
Other components of trailers include text that describe the kind of film that is being advertised to us. It was a mainstay of cinema in the 20th Century and like cinema it has changed with the times. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for voice-over narration, which like text was used a lot and was doing well in recent years with voiceover artists contributing. The most famous one is probably Don Lafontaine, who became forever associated with the much-used opening words “in a world…” and those words followed him around until his death in 2008. His voice can be found on trailers for The Simpsons Movie, Home Alone, and Scream to name but a few. Voiceover narration seems to be dead these days, now all we get is a villain who will give a hopefully fear-inducing monologue. I would rather have Lafontaine back, but I guess I can learn to take the monologues.
Trailers, like films, can be very clichéd, like the trailers for romantic films in which we nearly always see people hugging or crying. Or for horror films, we get some mild scares sprinkled throughout, and they all end on everything going quiet only for the silence to be broken by a jump scare and a stinging sound to get one last jump out of the audience before the title cards come up. They’re clichéd, yes, but especially for the latter they can give you a clear picture of the film.
I like trailers and hope that they continue to thrive from the makers noticing what works and learning from their mistakes. Given everything I’ve just laid out about the part they play in modern cinema, the question you might wish to ask yourself is: how do the trailers make you feel?
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- The New Mutants (2020) - 16th September 2020