A good movie trailer can be as entertaining on its own as the film it’s designed to promote.
Typically, trailers are just extended “highlights” of the best moments from a given movie, and leave the audience feeling like they’ve already seen everything that was worth seeing from that particular film. Everyone is familiar with the clichés of movies trailer, especially the over-used “In a world where…” lead-in, that seems to have found its way into trailers for movies of all genres and styles in recent years.
This week, I thought it would be fun to turn the spotlight on five of the most memorable movie trailers of all time.
These are trailers that are entertaining in their own right, and rather than just highlighting a few select moments from the movie they were designed to promote, really invite the audience into the world of the film, and pique their interest and curiosity in seeing more.
In the summer of 1999, the movie that everyone was talking about was The Blair Witch Project. As innovative in its way as any of the great horror films, perhaps its greatest innovation was in its unique promotional campaign. It was one of the first films to make heavy use of advertising on the Internet. Where it succeeded most was in fooling unwary viewers into believing what they were seeing was in fact actual footage taken by three filmmakers, lost in the woods of Maryland, who end up getting themselves into more than they bargained for when setting out to document the legend of the Blair Witch.
The film was shot in a unique and convincing documentary style (with a hand-held camera that reportedly made many viewers sick!) The trailer consists of a brief introductory title, providing the background of where the footage supposedly came from, followed by grainy, black-and-white hand-held documentary footage, over which is superimposed quotes from different reviews.
Stark, simple and effective – just like the film itself.
2. The Ten Commandments (1956)
In Hollywood’s Golden Age, no filmmaker was as well known as Cecil B. DeMille.
Sort of like a combination of Spielberg, Lucas and Peter Jackson rolled into one, DeMille was an expert showman, who above all understood that – in Hollywood, at least – even the greatest film in the world meant little if it didn’t put people in seats and wrap the lines around the block to the box office.
Having worked in Hollywood since the earliest days, when it was still a small rural town in the Wild West, DeMille had become, by the 1950s, the “great grandfather” of American movies. His name was synonymous with epics, and big budget spectacle. His films were steeped in the tradition of Victorian melodrama, but – just as James Cameron proved with Titanic – that old Victorian spectacle still packs ‘em in.
If DeMille’s films are epics by the standards of other movies, then his trailers are epics by the standards of other trailers. None of his trailers better exemplifies this than the one for his biggest and grandest film of them all, The Ten Commandments.
3. Pink Flamingos (1972)
Like DeMille, John Waters is a brilliant showman, albeit of a very different kind. Influenced by the likes of William Castle and Herschel Gordon Lewis, Waters knew that nothing would bring audiences in faster than promising them scenes too shocking to include in any trailer. As he explains in the brief introduction to the trailer, shot for the 1997 25th anniversary re-release of the film, no actual scenes from the film appear in the trailer at all.
It was positively groundbreaking in 1972, and is still quite effective today.
Most intriguingly, the trailer shows us the wide variety of audiences who came out to the film to satisfy their curiosity. The shocked, stunned and dazed reactions of the audience members who have just come out of a screening of the film pique the curiosity of even the most cautious moviegoer.
My favorite audience comment, when asked why they came out to see it: “Rex Reed told us that it’s fabulous”.
4. Psycho (1960)
The Master of Suspense was also a master of self-promotion.
With his droll sense of humor and skill in crafting tales of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock became as famous as his films themselves. In 1960, he created what many consider to be his supreme masterpiece, Psycho, a film with a twist so shocking that audiences would only be permitted to see the film from the start, not wandering in at the half-way point (as was still common practice in 1960).
Psycho took movie promotion to a whole new level.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in its unique and clever trailer. Hitchcock himself takes the viewer on a tour of the Bates house and motel, located right on the Universal backlot. With his trademark black humor, Hitchcock recounts the various murders that have taken place in the very locations that he’s walking through!
Audiences could always count on Hitchcock to find the humor in even the most grim of situations.
The Pyscho trailer is a tour-de-force performance by Hitchcock, and a masterful piece of promotion.
5. The Shining (1980)
Unquestionably the ultimate “simple but effective” in advertising, Stanley Kubrick’s trailer for The Shining is an intense, powerful visceral experience.
No other movie trailer has suggested “more with less” than this effective and unforgettable minute-and-a-half of promotional genius.
2 Comments