Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. It warmed my geek heart that you guys took so strongly to yesterday's article highlighting some of my favorite teaser trailers (read it here if you missed it). I got tons of emails, lots of Twitter love and some real deal fun cinephile talkback discussion, so I figured why not tempt fate and look at some of the rather significant teaser trailers I left out of yesterday's article. Are you ready for Revenge of the Teaser?
Horror more than just about any other genre seems to love to play around with the teaser. I suppose that makes sense, especially in the '80s when horror icons were enough to sell a movie by themselves. I put the great Doll House teaser for Nightmare On Elm Street 3 in the first article, but there are a bunch of great horror sequel teaser trailers I want to start off with.
Those are the established franchises, but horror as a general genre can be sold on some creepy images as long as the tone is securely established (and promises to scare you plenty for your ticket money). Alien from the last article is a good example of that, but one of the best teaser trailers ever created is simply one long locked down shot:
Damn that's effective. The sound design alone on that Shining teaser still gets under my skin. David Cronenberg took a different approach when selling Scanners. He chose to show one scene with an explosive finale.
While we're still in the serious horror teaser mode, you can't forget the infamously banned teaser for The Exorcist. I've seen this one projected and can totally understand why it was pulled. I'm not epileptic, but this trailer projected brightly in a dark theater really did its damndest to induce a seizure. Shame, because it's an incredibly cut teaser.
Another avenue that teaser trailers would try from time to time was to emulate other films and franchises, then pull the rug out from under you at the end. These are my two favorite examples of the fake out teaser.
Those dastardly marketing SOBs didn't just try to fake you out with other famous movies, sometimes they went in another direction.
I particularly like that Addams Family trailer. On a little aside, I just rewatched both Addams Family and Addams Family Values and they hold up! The first one's better, but I miss that kind of darkly funny family film. We don't get those much anymore. It's either the bright, happy, dramatic Pixar stuff or really stupid bottom of the barrel please-the-kids-who-cares-about-anyone-else crap.
One of the most talked about teasers in the talkbacks for the last article was for Superman: The Movie and you're all right. It shows nothing. It's literally just actor names and the Superman Logo. It doesn't even have the final John Williams score and it still makes me want to throw the movie on!
Remember the whole campaign was built up around not showing you much of Superman. The poster was the S symbol and the fantastic tag line promising You Will Believe A Man Can Fly.
Godzilla '98 was a shit film. We all agree on that (even Harry realized the err of his ways on viewing #2), but damn do they have some great teasers. The first one, with the T-Rex skeleton, was featured in the first article, but the teaser I remember the most is the B Teaser with the old man fishing off the pier.
I never noticed it before, but isn't that happy music a stripped down version of John Williams' Home Alone score? Or am I crazy?
I'm going to wrap up by featuring a trio of fantastic teasers from one Mr. Steven Spielberg. We saw some good examples of Amblin films with good teasers (The Back to the Future one is killer), but let's see some actually from Spielberg himself.
I vividly remember watching that Lost World trailer... Was it attached to Scream 2? I think it might have been. I don't remember the movie, but I remember being so on board for The Lost World after that teaser. Total “bring it on!” vibes.
I'm going to end with one more Spielberg teaser which isn't as fondly remembered as his Jurassic ones, although it's just as perfect a framing of the movie it's advertising. I give you the beautiful, melancholy teaser trailer for AI.
Again, this is not a complete list, but I think it's a solid gathering of some of the great teasers. Thanks for following along! This has been fun!
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
Follow Me On Twitter
