Jude White
A2 Media
9315
Editing Styles of Horror (Jack Spencely)
Editing is an extremely important part of any horror or indeed any trailer. Editng helps to not only change between shots but also control the tension of the trailer, the pacing, how the audience sees the shots and in what order and the numerous transitions that take place.
Transitions
The transistions in a trailer are extremely important. Their main purpose is to divide up the shots in the trailer. However they can also help to build tension and help with the control of the pacing. For example a way to build quick tension would be to move from shot to another, with no transition. This is called a cut. However these are generally used much more in films with high action scenes, but can be used in horror towards the end of a trailer alongside music to build to a crescendo.
Another transition is the dip to black, which is used a lot in horror trailers, especially at the beginning of the trailer which slows down the action and does what a horror movie would want to do, build suspense. Another one similar to this is the fade transistion which also causes a natural gap in-between two shots, causing an amount of suspense to be built.
Pacing
Pacing of a trailer is one of the most crucial parts as it sets up the tone for what kind of film it will be. This is obviously done through the length of the shots. Horror trailers will want to build suspense and tension which becomes more and more prominent towards the end as all parts of the trailer reach the climax, often ending with a scene deliberately designed to scare the viewer. The easiest way to do this is to have long shots at the beginning of the trailer to allow some of the context of the story to be told as well as build an initial layer of suspense. Then as the trailer moves on the end will have much shorter shots which build greater tension than the original starting shots. This trailer for the woman in black has a very good example of transistions and pacing.
Placement of Shots
All trailers will have a collection of shots from the film, usually not all shots will be in the order that they appear on screen. This allows the trailer to show some of the best moments from the whole film, without giving away too many spoilers from the end.
Usually at the beginning of a trailer the shots will be from the start of the film and in a chronological order most of the time. Thise allows the audience to get a feeling of the story and what is happening during the equilibrium stage and some of the disruption stage.
The trailers will then generally start taking parts from the film that don't follow any specific kind of chronology. This is generally seen as more of a montage of the most interesting, epic or terrifying moments from the film, that don't show too much story. This helps promote the films action rather than it's story.
In this trailer for sinister you can see numeorus examples of this chronology at the beginning and less at the end, as well as effective use of special effects
Special Effects
Special effects are an important part of all trailers and films. Especially in films that require a supernatural or futuristic element. For example certain monsters in horror movies look nothing like anything in real life and require motion capture and then a CGI monster or sometimes it's just changing the way a person looks for the purpose of making them look scary.
Special effects are however very small parts. For example colour correction is a very minor thing but it makes the entire trailer look much better.