What Movie Trailers Are Doing To Manipulate You

The quality of a trailer has the potential to make or break a movie at the box office. Because of this, perhaps no single category of video on the internet is as meticulously fussed over as movie trailers, with every note of music and every frame of action being carefully selected for maximum impact. Given how much attention they receive, movie trailers have evolved into their own art form, existing somewhere in the space between a short film and a music video.

But like any genre of art, movie trailers have conventions. They rely on tricks and tropes to get us hooked, to sell us a story, to manipulate us. Some of these techniques are recent trends, whereas others stretch back for generations. Some are clunky and obvious, and these will probably end up just being passing fads. Others are far subtler and way more effective. But fair warning, once you see the gimmicks, you won't be able to unsee them. Without further ado, these are the masterful techniques, recurring cliches, and underhanded tricks that modern movie trailers are using to manipulate you.

If you're making a trailer in today's world, then when it comes to sound effects, you want as many as possible, as loud as possible. Punches and kicks need to hit like a semi-truck. Any time you see a gun on screen, put in the "click" sound of the hammer being cocked, even if it isn't being cocked at the time. And if there's an explosion, blow those speakers out with a dubstep drop. Never forget that it's your sworn duty as a trailer editor together to give everyone in the audience hearing damage.

We've established by now that you're going to be playing an old pop song during your trailer, but if you've decided you don't want to record a new creepy cover, then at the very least, you need to juice that song up. Crank up the bass and the drums as loud as they'll go. The first trailer for Ocean's 8 had the right idea, with its "trailerized" version of Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'." So does the second one for Atomic Blonde, which uses a mashup of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" and Kanye West's "Black Skinhead." In the second trailer for Tomb Raider, notice how every sound effect is comically loud, with every punch or gunshot accompanied by a big drum hit. This one also gets bonus points for properly creepifying its song choice, the wonderfully on the nose "Survivor" by Destiny's Child.

Beyond just amping up the sound effects, what other ways can trailers "enhance" a moment to make it hit harder than it otherwise would? One classic way is to follow it up with a reaction shot. This shot will feature a character experiencing the emotion that the trailer wants us to feel. Sometimes this reaction shot will actually follow the event depicted on-screen in the final film, but other times, it'll be pulled from a totally different part of the movie altogether.

Much like an old sitcom laugh track trying to convince you that a middling joke is a real howler, a reaction shot in the middle of a trailer aims to tap into the audience's empathy for the characters and create a sort of faux communal experience based around social mimicry and behavioral contagion. Whatever they're feeling, we're feeling. At least, that's the idea.

Notice how often throughout the trailer for Ready or Not, there are brief cutaways of the main character being scared. Are the fantastical things that we're being shown throughout the final trailer for The Nutcracker and the Four Realms really all that impressive, or do they just seem that way because of all the reaction shots of characters experiencing wide-eyed awe? In the trailer for Mother's Day, there are dozens of shots of characters smiling or laughing ... but try counting how many actually good jokes occur.

The "braaam" is a truly iconic trailer sound. It's sort of like a tuba, sort of like a whale, and a lot like the sound a robot would make after stubbing its toe. And for the past decade or so, it's been Hollywood's favorite sound effect.

Exactly when the sound effect first appeared is difficult to say. The earliest version that we can find occurs not in a trailer but during Star Wars – Episode II: Attack of the Clones. In that movie, the "seismic charges" used by Jango Fett during a chase scene through an asteroid belt make a sound very similar to that now iconic drone. But the "braaam" truly broke out of obscurity with Inception, when Hans Zimmer used that one repeating drone over and over again as a central element of the film's soundtrack.

Nowadays, it's ubiquitous, especially in big budget action movies. You'd think that, out of all the trends on this list, this one obnoxious sound effect is the most likely to just be a passing fad. A few years from now, people will look back on the Inception sound as a defining element of the 2010s, the way that electric drums now immediately sound like the '80s. Then again, this sound effect has stuck around for an entire decade already, and its use only seems to be increasing, so who knows? Maybe the "braaam" is here to stay.

If you really want to sell your film as a must-see event, then when the title finally shows up, it has to be enormous. Sure, the screen of a movie theater might be called the "big screen," but your movie is even bigger than that.

Maybe you slowly reveal the title over the course of trailer, one letter at a time, like in the trailer for Prometheus. Alternatively, when your title starts to appear, maybe we're inside of it, and we don't even realize it yet. There are just strange shapes hovering above us. We have to zoom way out before we can see that we were actually inside a consonant all that time. This is the approach used in the trailers of The Mummy and Transformers: The Last Knight. Or maybe we're just minding our own business in a featureless black void before letters the size of skyscrapers start falling from the sky and crashing down all around us. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows opted for this approach.

When we finally see the whole title at once, it's going to feel like a monument towering over our heads. This sells the idea that the movie, much like its title, is an enormous event that looms above us. It's inescapable. Like an alien invasion, it will demolish our zeitgeist. We will have no choice but to watch it.