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.
