Prom Night
The trailer opens with the voice of a police man who is telling the audience the story about the main character from the film; this is taken straight from the script and is a good way of telling the audience the background of the film in order for us to understand what is happening. The voice over gives a short description of the film, detailing a man who killed a young girls family, and is now out of prison and back to kill her. He does this on her Prom night where she is staying with her school friends in a hotel, explaining the title of the film.
The music on the trailer is very fast paced and builds up, getting faster until a sudden stop, with the occasional sound of a knife scraping; this creates suspense and gives the audience an idea of what the genre of this film is. The sudden silence that is accompanied by the title shocks the viewer and gives them an idea of how the film is going to make the audience feel. There is also the sound of a heartbeat, creating a rhythm, which matches the pace of the moving images. In the trailer we are shown the main setting of the film, this being a hotel, means typical hiding places, and a large enough space for plenty of scenes and places to get lost, creating a sense of fear for the characters and audience, this is another indication of the genre being a horror thriller.
In the trailer we are given more information in the scenes than the characters are. For example, at the end we see a hand coming in from the right side of the screen towards the girl for is facing the left hand side of the screen, meaning we know what is about to happen to her but she has no idea, this type of two shot keeps the audience on the edge of their seats, creating tension and a sense that we are in the film.
The entire trailer is incredibly fact paced, with only a couple of seconds for each shot. There is not much speech, except for the voice over as the majority of sound comes from the music, sound effects and occasional scream.
Quarantine
The trailer begins with people finding the tape that this film is based around, in a housing complex that has been deserted. We then hear a voice of authority, who explains the tape and the events that took place leading to the discovery of it. In the first fifteen seconds we can establish that this is a thriller in the way that the story is being told, for example the voice talks of certain secrets and tells the audience that the “residents of the complex were never heard from again”, this tells the audience that something bad has happened in this building and has possibly been recorded on this tape. If the residents were never found, then this must mean something terrible has happened to them.
In the corner of the screen we see the traditional ‘record’ symbol that most people are familiar with, so this tells us that the story is going to be told from a character point of view and so we will only see what the characters will see, making us feel as though we are one of them. At the beginning we see the camera pointed at a woman who appears to be reporting on the issue inside the building before it all goes wrong and they are trapped inside with the camera, this is how we know why the camera is inside and how the story had been caught on tape and later found. This technique is similar to the one used in the film ‘Cloverfield’ where we see the events from a characters view.
Towards the end of the trailer we see the thing that is causing the things that are going to happen in the film. The ‘mutant’ character that is killing the people inside the building is seen by the camera as it moves around in the dark, using a night vision effect. This makes the audience very uncomfortable, but shows us what we are to expect from the film.
This like many other thriller trailers is very fast paced, with plenty of action and lots of scenes that are mostly only a few seconds each. This creates tension and suspense and shows audience the best bits from the film, whilst also leaving us wondering what to expect from the end of the film. The fact that the tape has been found but no other traces of people, makes us asks questions such as what has happened to the characters.
