Horror Film trailer Inspiration

As we thought that our trailer would be an independent film, Zoe and I both are attracted to these films for their unique style and we are drawn to the fact that they all have an odd abstractness to them which is appealing. We decided to look at some unusual film trailers, after researching several others, to find inspiration for our own.
The first trailer that we looked at was for the Swedish film 'Let the Right One In'. The movie was filmed in the Swedish Winter months which instantly influenced the lighting and filters to blue and cooler tones to correlate with this. These tones are also linked with the horror genre, mostly to depict either clinical horror or unease. Our trailer contains one main character which certainly challenges the typical conventions of a film trailer as she will have no one to interact with, and in turn, this means that our trailer will have no dialogue to carry it to the end. Due to this, we will have to use sound to drive our trailer and build tension through the use of effects and an appropriate soundtrack. However, this is the case in the trailer for 'Let the Right One In', where it is heavily reliant on the use of sound to accompany the two child main characters, which is also a convention of this trailer that allowed us to gain inspiration from on how we should portray our child ghost throughout our own. The main section of frames that we really enjoyed from this trailer below, was the last scene of snow falling, without a soundtrack for the last 20 seconds and the only sound that can be heard is that of a shrill echo. The combination of the crescendo of the music previously and the text over the lasting seconds of the trailer is a very effective ending that grips the audience and a creative way to mystify the feel of the trailer, and keep the audience guessing. The final feature that stood out was the contrast of the deep, blood red title against the pale snow failing in a dark sky, which caught my eye and was the last thing to see before the trailer ended. The overall editing and flow of this trailer as well as these stand out conventions have given and influenced many ideas for our own trailer 'Lullaby'.


We then went on to look at the trailer for the renowned horror film 'The shining', directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1980. The trailer was just so strange and shocking that it was very rememberable which made this trailer very effective in catching our attention. The combination of the loud strange music, still frame of the elevator and the rising credits, builds a lot of tension and keeps the audience engaged and wondering what might happen. The unexpected entrance of the huge flow of red 'blood' at 0.55 is shocking and grips you to keep watching. It is also a very effective way of insinuating death, without actually physically showing a dead body or gore that is not suitable for younger viewing or giving too much away. We thought that this was clever, and we both wanted something shocking to have the same impact on the audience in our own trailer and so we may include a scene like this and use this as inspiration for a part of our trailer.