Trailer Review: Sinister

The trailer for Sinister (2012) is a green-band trailer, approved for appropriate audiences. It begins by giving an overview to the story; showing how a family had died by hanging, 9 months before the events of the film happened. The trailer then goes on to give you an understanding of the new family that have moved into the house. Next, the husband of the family is shown watching old films in the attic, which turn out to be films of how the previous family that lived in the house died. The rest of the trailer goes on to give hints to the villain of the film, the Ghoul, which haunts the children and possesses them.

In terms of horror conventions, the trailer uses lots of parallel music to add emphasis to scenes in the trailer.  Throughout the trailer, collision cutting is heavily used, usually when narration is used with slow shots of the Dad, and then quickly cut to a short scene of either a Ghoul, possessed child, or a bloody marking of the Ghoul. The overall feel of the trailer is very eerie and doesn’t reveal too much about the film, but just enough to entice you to watch it.

I enjoyed the mix of horror and narrative in the trailer. The trailer would show a character telling some story about the film, and then a quick flash of a scary moment of the film would make you jump as the long, slow narrative parts would get your guard down. This worked very well, although it was repeated throughout the trailer which made it become a little predictable.  

Something I didn’t like about the trailer was that it showed too much of the film, even showing clips from the end of the film. I didn’t like this as from what was shown, you could already predict what was going to happen in the film, which spoils it for me.

Choice Of Trailer

Our trailer for our film Keith is going to be a mix between a scene and a highlights trailer. The main basis of the trailer will be a scene trailer, but with flashbacks over laid on top of other scenes in the film to create a ‘hybrid’ of the two. Our trailer is going to be a Redband trailer because we are going to use restricted narration and the flashback scenes are going to be quick, with minimal dialogue.

Horror Mood Board

We have selected images from Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Se7en, Dexter(Television series, Scream, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho and The Hills Have Eyes. We have chosen these images due to the killers in each film either being a very gory killer, or being a killer that we feel sympathy for. We have done this as these are two of the characteristics that our killer, Keith will have. We have chosen the killings in the film to be very gory as from personal ideas I have found that these are the most entertaining to watch, if done well. Keith also has a side to him that we feel sympathy for however, due to his troubled past and motifs for killing which relates to the images in the mood board.

Horror Films: Class Poll

Below is the class horror poll that we conducted in October, 2012. It was carried out with 8 males and 9 females, and confirmed that females generally prefer psychological and action horrors, while males prefer gory horrors. The results were close, however, which suggests horror can appeal to both genders.

Stereotypical Gory Horror Fan