Deconstruction of Teaser Trailer Halloween (Kurt)

Halloween (Rob Zombie)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i9nTqAFNA4

This teaser trailer has a few traits of a theatrical trailer, but doesn’t fully disclose the full story, though temporal editing and flashbacks help create a background story for this trailer. The flashback shows children looking innocent and laughing, and then with the use of subtitles to rely on, it explains there is a dark side, which is in a faded black background, with the words glowing against the darkness, so that the message is fully understood. The next clip is a longshot of the house which presumably a tragedy does occur in. You then get a clip of someone hidden about to mutilate his pet, giving the audience a sense of revulsion and horror at this act, and this person. Medium shot allows to focus on the body dressed in what looks like a Halloween costume, but mainly focusing on the gleam of a long carving knife that is shown as what could be a murder weapon. There is a scene then which the masked person kills someone, but it isn’t shown in one go, it’s shown with the use of cuts that go to black, then back to the scene in a fast pace. The next scene then sees the killers hand slowly touch a woman’s leg, then it flashes back to them standing still with a knife. The knife being significant in addressing its purpose of what is causing the gore and death. Then sirens are used to good effect, ambulance and police, to show that a huge scene has happened of importance. The camera then focuses on the face of a young boy in a police car, which then flashes suddenly to a zoom of a white mask that covers the screen as if addressing this is what he becomes, or this mask is what he wears, for his face to suddenly merge into the scene with the mask. Again though the mask is useful in creating the scene of tension because although we might have an idea of who it is, we can only see eyes, which look haunting and evil, therefore putting terror into the audience. After a slow pace of watching the person put the mask on, it continues at a fast pace, with cuts to the person holding body’s, and the flash of the knife again, people running, and grabbed behind to show how the horror ensues. At the end of the clip the title of the film Halloween floats ghost like into view in a misty projection slowly. The slow way it does this is unsettling. It then has one last scene used to make the audience jump at the last minute when there not expecting it, with silence, and then a scream to leave thee trailers imprint of fear on the audience for a last ending shot. The use of a voiceover is good at enhancing our view of the character. The effect of the knife being loud also stresses the seriousness of the blade. The first half has little bits of fast paced explosions of sound, where as the second half has a sound score that heightens how the action and terror starts to begin at a fast pace. Again diagetic sounds such as screams, cries, smashes are all used to create fear and shock in the audience. Again variations of clips are used, though mainly close ups of the action are most frequent throughout.

I can conclude from deconstructing both of these trailers that my teaser trailer, needs diagetic sounds such as screaming and crying, so that the audience can be put in the characters position, and feel sympathy for them, rather than just watching them over a sound score, it is effective in pulling the audience in. There has to be a variation of clips so my teaser trailer does not look dry and boring, as it has to enthral continuously. Music will have to be suitably played in the trailer, for example to create tension silence could be better than music to show this, where as the sound could not have a structure and come in different places of the trailer to give the feeling of chaos and confusion. Both trailers didn’t use bright lighting, but was rather dark and mood like, so there can only be bright lighting used to trick the audience into believing this is going to be a happy film, by suddenly contrasting it into a more dark contrast.