The Devils Rejects trailer

The MPPA green screen starts the trailer, shortly followed by the ‘Lionsgate’ film logo, which is the company who produced the film. A police clip follows with a reporter describing a crime scene as ‘words can’t describe it’, there’s also a strong underlying rumbling type sound effect with a woman’s voice singing. The screen then fades to black and then to a slow motion close up of one of the main characters ‘Baby’ laughing and smiling in a sunny field. It looks like a home video.
Another 3/4second clip of a man speaking is shown as again, it fades into black and fades back into another home movie style clip of the two other main characters. Again, it looks sunny and they look happy. At this point of the trailer, we don’t feel scared.
The first sound effect is a door being kicked in and a medium long shot of police running through it with guns, this clip is again in slow motion, the clips are still fading into one another.

The sound of a heartbeat increases from the background as we switch from a long shot of the three man characters walking towards the camera with guns, to a policeman with a gun. The heartbeat gets stopped suddenly by a gunshot closely followed with a screaming shot of a maid.

For around 15 seconds of the trailer, we see flashing clips of numerous scenes in the film. Most of the shots are close ups or medium shots so we get to know the characters before we even watch the film. The desert is included in quite a few of the backgrounds so we know the film will be set in a hot climate, possibly a small town as the ‘cops’ are wearing cowboy sheriff hats.

At 57 seconds, ‘A TALE OF’ flashes up in bold red writing, the black background it’s on fades into a birdseye view of a long winding road in the desert. The camera follows up this winding road at high speed, the camera angle getting lower and lower as it continues to flash ‘MURDER, MADNESS & REVENGE’ with sound effects every time a word changes into another. The letters are bold and appear from far away, get closer then fade.

‘The Devil’s Rejects’ appears at the end of the road in the same red style font as the captions, this time it’s organised in a triangle kind of shape and it stays up a few seconds. Underneath we can hear dialogue of (probably) a policeman speaking on his radio, it’s quite muffled and again we can hear the heartbeat like we heard earlier in the trailer. The ongoing theme is good, it helps everything to link together.

‘A film by Rob Zombie’ is the next caption screen, this time the background is black and the font is white. The font used is the same as the earlier red font however this screen is obviously less important as it’s less interesting and possibly irrelevant to the viewer.

As this is a successful trailer and this is good at representing the main conventions of a horror trailer – we can safely say that a theme is a good thing. I’ll take note of this when I record my own teaser film trailer.