The horror film excels at anticipation. An effective poster, trailer, or TV ad can spur our imaginations into a fearful run. Watching the actual movie might feel tame compared to the upcoming horrors we saw advertised.
Present fears are less than horrible imaginings. It’s the movies we haven’t seen yet that often scare us most. I remember a TV commercial that ran for John Frankenheimer’s (1979), about a killer bear mutated by hazardous waste.
We never see the monster, but its hideous noisemaking awakens a family of sleeping campers. The son hops up and down in his sleeping bag trying to get away. He's panicked and helpless – too terrified to know how silly he looks.
The commercial scared the hell out of me. You’ll never catch me sleeping in one of those mummy bags! So, tell me what movie ad frightened you?
posted by Wagstaff at 9:15 AM There was one TV ad for the original (1979) that was not only one of the scariest trailers I've seen, but also one of the most elegant. It was just a series of silent, quick-cut images from the film -- John Hurt in a spacesuit peering over the egg as it opens up; the facehugger leaping onto him and knocking him back; Tom Skerritt in the tunnel with the flamethrower; Ripley at the end of the movie in closeup, waiting for the right moment to turn and shoot the alien (out of focus in the background, emerging from that dashboad console hidey-hole) with her grappling hook gun; and scariest of all, a fleeting snippet of footage of Ash the android (Ian Holm), right after getting brained by Ripley, waving his hands in that jerky Mr. Roboto spasm while spitting milk and kind of rolling along that white padded wall.
Not having seen the movie -- and not having discovered the graphic novel edition of -- I had no idea what any of those images meant, but the whole thing was supremely creepy. What really made it -- what tied it all together -- was the audio track, an eerie abstract soundscape that consisted of what sounded like a sonar noise superimposed over some kind of repetitive glottal whistling. (It's hard to describe, but fans of the film probably know what sound cue I am talking about.
) This same sound cue was used in a very similar theatrical teaser for James Cameron's , which was cut in more or less the same way. I should also put in a word for last spring's online teaser for War of the Worlds -- the one with the suburbanites staring up at electrically-charged storm clouds before being obliterated by what appeared to be an aerial bombardment. I was impressed with it as as piece of advertising and filmmaking, but I wish I hadn't shown it to my daughter, who was seven at the time.
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