The other day, both John Squires and myself were tweeting about the latest trailer for Luke Scott’s Morgan. Admittedly, his tweet became a series of small conversations about the state of trailers but we both had the same feeling: the second trailer gave away far too much. You can see for yourself as I’ve put both side-by-side below.
It’s not a new trend for trailers to give away far more than they should. Just look at the trailer for Friday the 13th, which was a literal count of each death. However, what makes these spoiler-y trailers so much worse is the advent of social media, where the clip can then be circulated and thoughts can be levied to far wider audiences.
For example, when I saw a trailer in my youth (pre-widely available or even usable internet days), I could talk about it with my friends and that’s really about it. We’re talking a small circle of people (I wasn’t the most popular kid in elementary and middle school) and it didn’t go much further than that.
However, now I can tweet my thoughts to nearly 2,500 people who can hit ‘Retweet’ to their followers with a single click of a button. The ease with which spoilers and information can be shared is astonishing. That’s why your Facebook feed is inundated with people saying things along the lines of, “I’m going to be missing tonight’s episode of ‘The Walking Dead’, so it looks like I’m not going on Facebook until I watch it.” We’ve created a system where the information that people imbibe is out of their control, which has its positives and negatives.
Coming back to the point, horror trailers are guilty of sharing too much, which ruins the purpose of seeing the movie. When I go, I want to be shocked. I want to be terrified. I want to feel unsafe in what’s coming, not certain of impending events.
Last year, Trace wrote about how spoilerific the trailer for The Lazarus Effect was (as well as spoiler-y trailers in general), which gave away a key death. This year, the title for that offender goes to Don’t Breathe.
There are four main characters in that movie and the trailer shows one of them being killed. That death should’ve been a traumatic event to be experienced in the moment. Instead, we got it in a bite-sized trailer, so we experience a bite-size emotion. We will now enter the movie knowing of that character’s fate, so why should we allow ourselves to invest any emotion into that person? The fact is we shouldn’t and that immediately harms the movie as a whole.
The studio I guess doesn’t agree with that concept because they made the death one of the main focuses of their trailer AND they put chunks of the 3rd act sequence (from what I’ve heard) at the end of the trailer, essentially showing us segments of acts 1, 2, and 3. At that point, why do we care about seeing the movie? We’ve been shown enough that we can put together the pieces on our own.
Remember the trailer for Quarantine? Or how about Carrie or Last House on the Left? Each of these trailers had a serious problem of giving away the ending. And when I’m talking about the ending, two of the three showed the final sequences of the movie while one revealed multiple points of the climax.
Coming back to Morgan the first teaser was haunting and mysterious. It used audio to create an unsettling clip that showed almost nothing besides empty rooms and stark hallways. The full trailer however gave nearly everything away. It showed what Morgan looks like, what makes her “special”, exciting events, and created a narrative from which we can with almost near pinpoint accuracy guess what’s going to happen and who’s going to die.
This problem doesn’t just fall in the horror world. Batman v Superman was built up to be a battle between two superhero icons. Then they released a trailer that showed them team up to battle Doomsday. The whole title is now defunct because we know that they’re not against each other. Instead, we’re waiting for them to stop bickering and get to the part where things get interesting.
In closing, let me show you the trailer for Insidious, which I feel is an example of a great trailer from recent years. It barely shows any of the scares and when it does it’s in sharp and fast flashes, too quick for us to fully absorb what we’re seeing. Additionally, the line “It’s not the house that’s haunted…it’s your son,” is fantastic. It takes the haunted house theory and upends it, making the movie far more interesting because this is a concept that hasn’t really been done before. It intrigues and excites without revealing much of what makes the movie so damn fascinating and eerie.
Hollywood, there’s a serious problem with giving away too much in trailers. Instead, we need more teasers. If a trailer is two and a half minutes and a movie has a 90-minute runtime, then the trailer accounts for showing us nearly 3% of the film. That is too much. We need 1% but that amount should hook us and make us drool for more, not giving us enough of the meal that we pass on dessert.