History/background of trailers

Film trailers have changed over the last 50 plus years in their overall style and what they revealed to entice an audience, each decade since 1950 has had a unique characteristic, especially when referring to the horror or sci fi   genre’s.

The 1950s film previews:

-Had longer trailers

-Told the whole story, or almost revealed the whole plot

-Flashed words on the screen, such as: terrifying! Close your eyes! Never before seen!

The 1960s movie trailers:

-Still used bold flashing words

-Tried to build on famous actors' names

-Used narration to summarize the story

-Often showed the ending of the movie, in order to reveal an exciting effect

The 1970s previews

-Were still too long, but tightened a bit

-Revealed less of the story, but still showed many key or spoiler scenes

-Enjoyed teasing us with mis-edited scenes, often out of order

The 1980s movies had trailers that were tighter:

-More abruptly edited

-Told very little about the movie

-Often included scenes that were cut from the final edit of the film

-No spoilers, and instead total mystery about the endings

-Began to revel in catchy tag-lines

Towards the 1990’s the trend was changed to using rock style background music and not giving away much of the film’s plot and instead rely on exciting scenes cobbled together which reveal barely anything in the way of the overall direction of the film but usually reveals the genre at least. They also used to use zoom editing in most scenes as that was the trend at the time.

Today’s trailers usually feature popular music in the background to catch the attention of any potential viewers and show less and less of the real story, utilize quicker editing and zooming effects.

Often these trailers are more exciting than the actual movies.

Trailers themselves were created for the sole purpose of enticing viewers to come and watch feature length productions at the cinema and do this by using popular music, exciting scenes and catchy tag lines.