🎬 #118 The Pull Of Trailer Music.
This week, I’m purely focusing on trailers - which are enjoyable their own right. The choice of music for a trailer makes a huge difference. The editors who put these together have such a challenging ask - similar to the poster conundrum, they have to tease but not reveal too much. Give a taste without giving too much away. And they have to make something that has power - that draws you in and gives you an emotional reaction to a series of edited images. Trailers represent the craft of storytelling - it’s a microcosm of filmmaking that has to compel us to watch the film. And the music is the key.
Happy choosing, happy viewing
Bry
FILM ONE: WATCHMEN
2009 Dir Zack Snyder
2hrs 42 mins
Using The Smashing Pumpkins track - The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning perfectly sums up the mood of the film. Apathetic, dark, cynical - kind of sexy. Snyder’s take on the seminal graphic novel is equally fun and bleak, one of the strongest works in his filmography. An anti-hero superhero film before that was cool to do. A subversion of the genre in its own way.
Subversion is also interesting when it comes to the track, because the song was originally recorded for Joel Schumacher's 1997 film Batman and Robin where the title was the opposite way around - The End Is The Beginning Is The End. The reworked version used in the trailer is a nice nod to the fact that Watchmen is a film that messes with the classical ideals of superhero archetypes - even Batman himself. Enjoy the trailer, even if you don’t watch the film.
TL;DR: The trailer music captures the mood of Snyder’s subversive vision, the grungy, alternative energy is clear from the get go.
*Available for a small rental fee on Apple, Amazon, Google and YouTube in the US and the UK.
Fact: At around the 45min mark, Zack Snyder makes a cameo as a US solider. This only appears in the Director’s Cut.
FILM TWO: US
2019 Dir Jordan Peele
1hr 56 mins
I’m not sure about you, but I never associated Luniz’s 1995 track with anything in any way creepy. That all changed when it was adapted to be used in Peele’s launch trailer for his second film - Us. A masterful few tweaks and the song goes from catchy Summer is here tune to something a bit more nightmarish.
But the ingredients were always there - the child-like jingles in the background, the rhythmic underlying darker bass notes. For me, this was a brilliant use of a track which totally changed the mood of the track itself. So much so, that now I can’t really listen to it the way I did before I heard it used in the trailer. Again Peele is subverting expectations, playing with the audience, summed up by revising and re-versioning this classic.
TL;DR: Muniz’s I Got 5 On It - is reworked to startling effect in the trailer for Peele's Us.
*Available for a small rental fee on Apple, Amazon, Google and YouTube in the US and the UK.
Fact: Peele himself said ‘I feel like the beat in [the] song has this inherent cryptic energy, almost reminiscent of the 'Nightmare on Elm Street' soundtrack.’