The Evil Dead (2013) trailer review

NAME OF FILM: Evil Dead

YEAR RELEASED: 2013

GENRE OF TRAILER: Horror

MY MARK AFTER VIEWING: 9/10

What happened within the trailer?

Within the trailer we are shown a group of people that are all within a cabin, we then see one of them open a book which clearly states “leave this book alone” which as a result of continues to purge through the book. Meanwhile evil spirits are released and a demon tries to kill them. They slam the demon inside a trapdoor and chain it up; it is then revealed they need to stop the evil from killing them. Right at the end of the trailer, we are shown the demon cutting her tongue and shoving her bloody mouth against the female role’s mouth.

Which positive, clever or interesting aspects do you think you could include in your own trailer? What generic features are fulfilled well?

The editing of the trailer was very successful and created a bit of a jump scare towards the end of the trailer; it used collision cutting which cut from quick, slow and back to quick again whilst showing the body horror between the razor blade and the demon’s tongue. I liked the pacing of the trailer and I hope to capture that same affect within my trailer, I’d like to create an uncomfortable feeling from the audience’s perspective with gore. Whilst on the topic of gore, there was a lot of it used within the trailer which connotes to the audience the overall genre of the trailer and makes the trailer creepy through the aesthetics of gore. With my trailer I plan on making an action horror with elements of gore within it, but by exploiting the gore element I feel you can create creepiness about everything as this trailer does. The trailer used inter titles which didn’t linger for too long as to rip the audience’s attention from the action to slow moving plot lines but were used enough to tell the overall story. I hope to recreate that same effect by using inter titles to establish plot but, not too much to break away from the horror of the trailer. The sounds used for the trailer complimented it really well, during the action based points of the trailer we have a loud noise which sounded like a chainsaw, and it created jumpiness about the trailer but also helped keep the thematics of the film. The trailer also featured music which helped to fit the eerie feeling of the cabin in the woods, and it had most impact during the quieter parts of the trailer, before being collision cut to a loud noise which helps to emphasise the jumpiness. I would hope to use music within my trailer in a very similar way to the way it was used in the Evil Dead trailer, I think the collision cutting of music works well and have the potential to scare audiences and entice them to see the movie. I like the use of sound effects over the action points too. During the trailer, we see very horrific and well-made gore effects, an example would be the tongue cutting part with the razor blade or the throwing up of blood onto the victim’s face, which makes the audience cringe, I feel it works well and is well suited to the trailer whilst making the audience feel uncomfortable which is the desired effect; with horror deriving from the Latin ‘horrere’ meaning to shudder, I would want to make my audience shudder.

Which aspects of the trailer did you think were unsuccessful, and would have put off its target audience? How is it disappointing?

The trailer was incredibly long, and spanned on 2:21 which is quite long for a trailer, also with a trailer this long you’re showing the audience a lot of the movie which gives away a lot of the key action parts of the trailer. Also whilst the use of gore was good, I worry it was a bit too much for a trailer, the point of a trailer is to advertise and sell a movie but by showing everything that happens, people won’t be as impressed or shocked prior to seeing it all in the trailer. This I would want to avoid within my trailer, I’d like to keep the audience captivated with the use of gore but not give away too much.

What was the trailer’s avg. score in class? Why did it receive that mark?

The average score given by the class was 9 and the reason it scored so high was a result of a few reasons. The first being the intertitles that were used and the way they were used, the trailer uses that ‘boom’ effect over each word that is put on the screen, and they don’t linger too long so it keeps the audience captivated. Also the collision cutting in the trailer was really effective, towards the end of the trailer we are shown a montage of different gore effects and it slows the trailer right down again during the tongue splitting scene which is genuinely horrific to watch. The music used was very creepy and captured the atmosphere of the location and trailer, it had an eeriness about it which help to captivate the genre of the movie, it ends with a creepy music box tune accompanied by a young girl’s vocals which is a common feature of music within horror movies. The other plus is the film contains a good storyline, and whilst it differs from the original movie in 1981, some elements are the same and it’s nice the reboot pays tribute to aspects of the original. It’s these kinds of aspects that gave the movie the score it received.