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.