PRE: Textual Analysis of Teaser Trailer By John

A Nightmare on Elm Street is an American film classed as a Slasher, directed by Samuel Bayer, written by Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer and distributed by New Line Cinemas. The trailer has a duration 2 minutes and 8 seconds long which breaks the conventions of a typical movie trailer which is usually between 39-50 seconds long. The film centers around a group of teenagers being stalked and murdered in their dreams by a man named Freddy Krueger, eventually discovering they all share a common link from their childhood that is making them targets for Freddy.

The trailer begins with a couple of establishing shots of the outside of an abandon factory with a dull, low key lighting and a misty atmosphere, which is a connotation of something bad going to happen or an event that’s happening during a time crisis. It is then followed by a couple continuity shots showing Freddy being chased into the abandon building and having a petrol bomb thrown in, causing a fire. The introduction to the trailer indicates the movie to be a mysterious and haunting that those people had made a terrible mistake and will pay a price, also the quick close up shot of the woman’s face expressing her reaction which was connoting fear and horrified form her non-verbal communication.

Starting at one minute into the trailer, a song is being sang by a young child and it is the trailer’s soundtrack music which is there to build the tension and this is effective because the song is sang slowly with a dull atmosphere also their voice echoes and a drum beat plays in the background to amplify the progress building the tension higher and higher. There’s also multiple shots with silence to prepare the audience for the jumps and sudden shots and this helps because the silences gets the audience worried and panicking which makes them vulnerable to the jumps.

There were many low key lighting shots; approximately 80 percent of the trailer was dark which suggests how important the dark is and the terror and fear that is brought from the dark. Also there were multiple shots of different locations of the interior of warehouses or factory, and these shots are indicating that most of the violence are involved in these locations as shown form the shot, for example, the two little girls locked up, the claws scratching against the side and the grabbing of the teenagers head.