It feels odd to type “greatest”, but Schindler’s List is one of the most powerful. It promises something bleak, hellish, and moving.
I always thought the trailer for The Strangers was one of the best.
Not that the movie was great, but this Godzilla teaser was awesome.
I don’t know about “made your blood run cold,” but Alfred Hitchcock’s trailer for PSYCHO (link to YouTube: Psycho Trailer (1960) - YouTube ) is one of the funniest of all time. If you’ve seen the movie, he basically tells you the whole plot. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s a teaser that tells you very little.
His trailer for THE BIRDS is also quite wonderful: The Birds Trailer - YouTube
In hindsight, it isn’t the most well-edited trailer in history, but at the time it convinced me this movie was worth seeing (I’ve always been more Marvel than DC). The end bit, with Jack’s “Wait’ll they get a load of ME!” and that laugh, still sends chills up my spine.
The trailer for White Noise was a lot better than the movie turned out to be.
I can’t find it now, but The Spotless Mind trailer I remember didn’t include any footage from the actual movie, but instead was done up as an advertisement for the mind-erasing company in the movie.
There was a viral marketing blurb that was an advertisement for Lacuna, Inc. (the fictional memory erasing service that is the central to the plot of the film) but there was also a more normal trailer (if anything from a Kaufman-penned script can be described as “normal”) which features scenes from the film. Admittedly, they don’t really explain or condense the film (an impossible task) but it is still a very energetic trailer.
Stranger
Sounds like this one:
This one is a combination of Lacuna commercial and regular trailer:
They’re all good!
I’ll see your Hardware Wars and raise you Darktown After Dark.
(Here’s a little context for you youngsters who don’t know who Earl Butz was!)
The Tron Legacy trailer with the Daft Punk score was really cool.
Not to mention its spritual(if not actual) sequel.
I was going to mention the trailer and comercials for the 1977 Star Wars movie, but I’ve been outdone. Though my high school buds and I would watch afternoon TV for hours just to see the Star Wars commercial. I watched the trailer on YouTube earlier today and it doesn’t convey the excitment I remember. Alas, lost youth!
At least Lucas did not sully my fond memories of the 1970s/80s flicks series by producing a lame and souless set of prequels containing one of the most annoying characters in cinematic history.
Somewhere, in a box, I have a VHS tape containing that. It also has Hardware Wars, Bambi Vs. Godzilla, and Porklips Now! Unfortunately, I don’t know which box it’s in, nor where the box is.
Thanks for finding Closet Cases Of The Nerd Kind. I’ve been wanting to see that again.
To continue the hijack, here’s Porklips Now!:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
I saw the Star Wars trailer in January 1977 (while seeing Network, and was extremely underwhelmed. It used a brooding, non-John Williams score and they managed to choose clips that really didn’t make me want to see the film. And they had a different logo, as well.
Undoubtedly one of the greatest trailers was the original one for Superman It used footage reportedly shot for Ice Station Zebra, with an impressive score and simply the names of the featured players, shot with the slit-scan camera. You had no idea what it was for until the end, when you saw the slit-scanned Suiperman “S”, and at the end the word “Superman” rendered with the same technique so that it looked as it did on the comic book covers.
The ad made R/greenberg associates, who went on to do titles for films like Alien, Altered States, Flash Gordon, and many others, as well as doing effects work for Xanadu and Flash Gordon.
it might not look all that impressive now, when we have CGI that can do all this faster and easier, but it’s really a matter of style – slit-scan had been around since the late 1960s, when it had been used for the trip sequence in 2001 and the opening credits for The ABC Movie of the Week, so it was arguably old-hat then, but they made something exciting and new.
And the ad didn’t reveal any of the film.
Runner-up: The original Star Trek the Motion Picture trailer, narrated by Orson Welles:
I can’t think of a better trailer to make your rusty water run cold than that for The Shining. The excellent fake “Shining” trailer gets so much play it’s almost forgotten how good the simple original one was.
Braveheart
That segment after, “…they’ll never take our freedom!” Goosebumps every single time, even after 17 years.