What This Month's Horror Trailers Are Actually Telling Us

I had three tabs open last night, all trailers, all horror, and I watched them back to back like some sort of feral film critic who forgot she has a bedtime. This is the bit of the year where the trailers start arriving faster than I can make tea, and September has been generous. So here is what I noticed, and what I think it means for the rest of us who just want something good to watch with the lights off.

The slow-burn ones are back, and I am relieved

For a while every trailer seemed to be a jump scare stapled to another jump scare, cut so fast you couldn't tell what you were meant to be scared of. This month's crop is different. A good few of them are doing the quiet thing again: a long hallway, a sound that shouldn't be there, nobody screaming until the last ten seconds. That is the kind of dread I actually want. The jump scare compilation trailer tells you the film has no patience. The slow one tells you it trusts its own atmosphere, which is usually the better sign.

I will say this every year and mean it every year: nothing has quite matched the original for pure, patient dread. If you want a reminder of how it is done properly, the Halloween 1978 Blu-ray box set is still the textbook, Halloween 1978 Blu-ray box set and I watched it again this week purely for research purposes, which is what I tell myself when I want an excuse.

Folk horror is having a proper moment again

Isolated village, something wrong with the harvest, a ritual nobody wants to explain to the outsider. It is a pattern that never really goes away, but this month there are noticeably more of them than usual, and I am not complaining. There is something about dread rooted in soil and season rather than a haunted house that feels older, and slightly more likely to actually happen to someone, somewhere, which is exactly the sort of thought I should not have at eleven at night with the heating off.

The best of these trailers never show you the ritual itself. They show you people arriving somewhere cheerful and sunlit, and let the wrongness creep in around the edges. That restraint is doing a lot of work, and it is the difference between a trailer that makes me sit up and one that makes me sigh and close the tab.

The haunted house trailer that gives away too much

I need to have a quiet word with whoever is cutting these trailers, because at least one of them showed me what I am fairly sure is the third act twist in the first ninety seconds. I understand the instinct. You want the audience to know there is a big swing coming. But a horror trailer that hands over its ending has done my job for me before I have even bought a ticket, and not in a good way. If you are the sort of person who reads spoilers on purpose, good for you, genuinely, but the rest of us would like to be surprised by the thing we are paying to be surprised by.

My rule of thumb: a trailer should make you afraid of what you don't know, not smug about what you've already worked out.

What I am actually excited for

Cutting through all of it, the ones that have stuck with me are the ones that gave me a feeling rather than a plot. A shot of a house I would never want to live in. A sound I can't place. A character's face doing something wrong in a way I can't explain to anyone who wasn't watching with me. Those are the trailers that get a rewatch tonight, and probably a proper review from me once the films themselves actually turn up.

Until then I will be doing what I always do this time of year: making the flat smell like autumn, keeping something warm in my hands, and pretending I am not slightly disappointed every time a trailer turns out to be for a film I've already half worked out. It is spooky season. We are all allowed to be a little dramatic about it.

#ad. This post contains Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.