By Nell Geraets
The trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s upcoming horror Trap begins well. A man has taken his teen daughter to a pop concert, only to discover they’re trapped inside the venue with a deranged serial killer. It’s a simple premise, yet it promises a thrill.
But it keeps going. Before you know it, you find out the father is the serial killer.
And it’s not just Trap making the mistake of revealing too much. These days, watching a trailer can feel like one big spoiler. They’re packed with as much material from the film as possible, often including the best jump scares, stunts, twists and gags.
Movie trailers seem to be major spoilers these days. Why do they give so much away?Credit: Compiled by Bethany Rae.
Granted, only showing the best parts of something is bound to generate hype, which is ultimately what trailers are made to do. But this can come at the expense of the audience’s enjoyment of the film itself. Would you have enjoyed The Sixth Sense as much if the trailer had already explained that Bruce Willis’ character was a ghost? Even if you did, the chances of it going down in cinematic history would surely have been much slimmer.
So, why are trailers giving away so much now?
Trailers are the most powerful marketing tools behind films, says the founder of film marketing agency The Solid State, Walter Bienz.
“They are key to determining the success of a film and have become a cultural phenomenon in their own right, with more people sometimes watching trailers than the film themselves,” says Bienz, who has helped create trailers for films like The Babadook and ONEFOUR: Against All Odds.
So there’s a great deal of pressure to get the trailer right, something Bienz says is rarely easy.
“Editing a movie trailer requires a delicate balance between giving the audience enough to satisfy them, but not so much they want to punch you in the face,” he says. “They don’t want to be robbed of the ‘aha’ moment in the cinema – that’s what they pay for … Skilful trailer editors concentrate on story – the who and why – and avoid plot – the what, where, when and how – as much as possible.”
To be memorable, audiences should be given as little information as possible, he says. “Confuse and you lose.”
The trailer for Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s recent abduction horror Abigail outlines the majority of the plot, including the fact that the eponymous character is a vampire. If it had been marketed simply as a traditional abduction film, cinema audiences would have been stunned when Abigail suddenly, and unexpectedly, transforms into a deadly creature.
But would a trailer for a run-of-the-mill abduction horror have pulled in as many viewers? Thanks to the growing number of streaming services and sophisticated social media algorithms, perhaps not.
“It’s so hard to break through among the noise of all the alerts constantly calling for attention,” says chief executive of Palace Cinemas Benjamin Zeccola. “These days, audiences seem to clamour for more information when deciding whether to watch a film.”
Before the market became so saturated and competitive, cinema attendance was much higher, allowing trailer-makers to be more nuanced in their approach. The trailer for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) famously didn’t include any material from the film itself, instead following Hitchcock on a tour of the filming location. The Exorcist (1973) trailer simply presented a variety of black-and-white demonic faces flashing on the screen using a strobe effect, both highly disturbing and effective.
Both of these encapsulate the tone, themes and stakes of each movie without giving away the entire plot, Zeccola says. However, these trailers would probably perplex modern-day audiences and fail to prove why paying to see the film is more worthwhile than watching a stream of TikToks for free.
“Alien is often cited as having the greatest trailer of all time for its simplistic brilliance. However, now it seems too repetitive and the set looks like papier-mâché,” Zeccola says.
As a result, major studios are generally more risk-averse when marketing films, says chief executive of Melbourne’s Cinema Nova, Kristian Connelly. “If Timothée Chalamet took us on a tour of the Wonka set, I doubt that would track with audiences. People need things to be shown to them now,” he says.
Films distributed by major studios make the most of their earnings during the opening weekend, Connelly says, putting much of the onus on the trailer to simply get people in seats as soon as it lands.
However, smaller and independent distributors, like A24, are usually less bound by such financial pressures, as their pictures generally have smaller budgets.
“They can afford to take risks where the studios can’t … They’ve created a terrific studio brand which captures the imagination of movie-goers in a way that we haven’t seen since Walt Disney back in its heyday. If the A24 brand comes on screen, people are engaged, even if it’s a more vague and mysterious communication of what the movie is about.”
As an example, Connelly notes Yorgos Lanthimos’ upcoming Kinds of Kindness, which recently released its first teaser. “It gives you nothing. It’s basically just the cast doing weird stuff. They’re saying, ‘if you like Yorgos, if you like Emma Stone, if you liked Poor Things, then come along and see this one’.”
For larger distributors, revealing “too much” in a trailer may just be a new necessary evil. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Zeccola notes the technical and visual sophistication of recent trailers, many of which may give away a portion of the plot, but still seem more original than the days of the baritone voice-over trailers (many trailers between the 80s and 90s were narrated by the same voice actor, Donald LeRoy LaFontaine).
The suspenseful bass reverberations in the Inception trailer, for example, set a standard for many future mystery-thriller trailer scores. And Jordan Peele’s Nope trailer riles up viewers with a succession of quick, aesthetic cuts, while careful not to spell out the overarching threat.
“People still have full-body physical and emotional reactions to trailers,” Zeccola says. “What really hooks the viewer is the emotional appeal. That’s where the storytelling art of making a trailer reveals itself.”
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