The internet is a lovely place, unless you don’t enjoy continual rants about unimportant topics –such as this one that you’re currently reading. One topic that never seems to go away is the spoiler-filled nature of movie trailers.
On many occasions during my podcast (TUMP) I’ve talked about trailers and bringing up my thoughts on slightly obtuse trailers, mostly teaser trailers. I find that most of the times I tend to gravitate towards the trailers which don’t try to sell me a story as opposed to trying to sell me a mood; which is where teaser trailers come in. They know they have a minute or less to grab my attention, and instead of trying to rush through plot points to make a film seem as derived as it probably really are.
However, I’ve come to realize a third type of trailer in recent days. One which sells me what the film is not.
In the last six months I’ve seen Hugo, The Cabin in the Woods and Perfect Sense. These three movies have nothing in common, other than the fact that their marketing decided to not mention a relatively key aspect of the film that they were selling us. Weirdly enough looking back I can only see this as a true detriment to the decision process of “should I go or not?” question that one asks themselves when eventually seeing it as an option at the multiplex.
We all bitch and moan about trailers spoiling it for us, but the question I ask myself is would I even want to go to any of the films above based on the non-spoiler marketing presented to me? The Cabin in the Woods looked like a bad clichéd horror film, Hugo looked like a boring children’s movie and Perfect Sense seemed to be another love story where two people make each other cry a lot. While this is all partially true about each of those movies it is also true that the parts of the films that were left out of the marketing is what eventually makes each of the films unique and set apart from the genre they are being sold as, and that is worth a lot to a movie nowadays.
Does this thought process then basically mean that I’m asking for trailers to spoil movies for me? I don’t think so. As I said, the best kinds of trailers are those that sell a mood rather than a specific story, and that’s where I think these trailers fail. These incomplete trailers are selling a mood that’s completely contradictory to the film that I eventually get. The Cabin in the Woods is satire not cliché, and Hugo is revelatory not trite. Or quite possibly I’m looking too closely at this all and should just do like other film enthusiasts and just ignore trailers entirely and just go to the movies and enjoy as best they allow me to… bah to that.