Although DreamWorks SKG released its haunted-house movie "The Haunting" in theaters on Friday, the studio has been trying to scare up business for it for months. The real haunting started in January, when the studio released its cerebral thriller "In Dreams."
The coming-attractions reel before "In Dreams" gave audiences their first peek at "The Haunting," and a tantalizing peek it was. The preview showed no actors; it merely featured images of a creepy mansion, with the voice of an older woman reading a nursery-rhyme-style poem about an old house.Then, the woman's voice deepened to something more sinister-sounding, and the house took on an evil-looking face, leading up to the preview's closing words, written in blood-red script: "Sleep tight."
In movie-industry terminology, a short preview like this is called a teaser, and it eventually was replaced by a more explicit trailer featuring actors and effects. Too bad, because the first "Haunting" teaser was a textbook example of a good movie trailer -- one that arouses your interest without revealing too much and is attached to a main attraction from a similar genre.
"I have one rule for trailering in commercial play, and that's anything goes, as long as it's appropriate for the audience," says Michael H. Price, director of the Gourmet Cinema program at Fort Worth's AMC Sundance 11. "The trailering I encourage is the type where you do want to stroke the audience with similar subject matter."
But movie trailers aren't an exact science. Trailers are sales tools, of course, commercials that few people seem to mind watching. The trick for studios and theater chains is putting the commercials in front of the right buyers.
"I think, as far as going to the movies, seeing trailers is part of the experience," says Brian Caldwell, vice president of marketing for Fine Line Pictures. "Trailers are sort of mini-movies, if you do them right."
There have been some excellent teasers and trailers during the past few weeks, such as the cryptic ones for "The Blair Witch Project" and "Eyes Wide Shut," both box-office successes. There have been some misfires, too, such as the tell-all trailer for "Arlington Road," a box-office disappointment.
Here's a crash course in how trailers work: Studios work with a theater circuit to place trailers for their upcoming movies in individual theaters. The theaters then have a choice of what to attach to feature presentations. Some theater chains control trailer content more than others, and some trailers come attached to the main attraction (usually if they come from the same studio). In the end, it's usually the theater managers who decide which trailers should go with what features.
That doesn't mean that trailers are an opening act, though one theater chain has taken to running a coming-attractions reel that calls trailers and attached commercials "pre-show entertainment." In fact, instead of setting a mood for a feature, too many trailers can detract from a feature.
"There's no point in playing more than three trailers before a film, because the audience stops paying attention," says Tearlach Hutcheson, manager of Landmark's Inwood Theatre in Dallas. "I get upset when I go to a movie and have to sit through a half-dozen trailers, along with the commercials they play before them."
For the past week, the Inwood has been doing sellout business with "The Blair Witch Project," an offbeat horror movie that was hyped with some of the year's best teasers. "Witch's" teasers went in steps: The first one featured a stark title card about the disappearance of three student filmmakers in 1994, followed by the tear-streaked eyes of one of the filmmakers filming a terrified apology to her parents and her crew's parents.
The second featured outtakes from what looked like documentary footage, followed by a screaming woman running through the woods. The third featured quotes from many of the glowing reviews of the film.
As striking as "Witch's" trailers are, though, Hutcheson says that they're not the reason the film is a success.
"Trailers themselves don't bring people in," he says. "Connected with something else, they bring people in. In this case, there was a lot about the movie on the Internet, and that combined with the teasers helped bring in a younger audience."
The Internet has become one of the best places to see trailers, letting movie buffs watch them whenever they want instead of being at the mercy of theater managers and television-commercial programmers. Most studios include trailers on their official Web sites, and a rudimentary search revealed about a half-dozen sites devoted at least in part to trailers. The trade-off for the convenience is that Web-surfers have to be willing to put up with poor sound and resolution, and often the trailer image is only slightly larger than a postage stamp.
The increased accessibility of trailers has made more movie buffs sensitive to "spoilers," or scenes that reveal too much of what's in a movie. The trailer for "Arlington Road," for example, revealed the movie's villain, even though he's portrayed ambiguously for at least half the film.
"Good movies are good stories well told, and that's their job," says Barrett Travis of UA Theatres distributor-relations branch. "A good trailer, in my mind, is one that doesn't give away the whole story."
Because theaters try to program trailers for target audiences, some trailers run more infrequently than others. An "event" film such as "The Phantom Menace," whose trailer had so much buzz that fans allegedly paid just to see it and then left before the feature attraction, or "Wild Wild West," is likely to be ubiquitous because of its crossover appeal. But it might be more difficult to see a trailer for an African-American-oriented feature like Miramax's upcoming "In Too Deep."
"That's up to the exhibitor," says Marcus Hu, co-president of Strand Releasing. "We can suggest what we want to run with a movie, but ultimately it's up to the exhibitor."