I love scary movies where there’s a sense of “wrongness” instead of an obvious monster. You know, movies where the vibe is more unsettling than scary. However, most of these movies end up disappointing me by the end. It seems like nobody can write a payoff that lives up to the original concepts. Sometimes these stories would have worked better as short films than full-length features. For that reason, the trailers for these movies are often more interesting than the movie itself. In some cases, I’d happily watch the trailer over and over again, just because they’re like short films in themselves.
Lights Out was a great short film. I can’t comment on the full movie because I haven’t seen it, but from the reviews I’ve read, it wasn’t very good. And that makes sense. The concept of Lights Out just doesn’t work as a two-hour movie. The scare was based around a single special effect – a shadowy figure that only appears in the dark, and vanishes when the lights are on. I don’t think that concept would even work for a half-hour “Tales From The Darkside” episode. But as a 5 minute film, it’s pretty scary.
Vivarium had a really cool concept. A couple is in the market for a house, and looks at a place in one of those cookie cutter communities. When they’re ready to leave, they get lost trying to find their way out of the neighborhood. After dozens of turns, they end up back in front of the same house. They try again and again until they run out of gas, and always end up in front of the same house. At one point one of them climbs up on the roof for a better view, and just sees an endless neighborhood of identical houses, as far as the eye can see in every direction. The trailer for Vivarium pretty much sums up the first half hour of the movie, which is the best part. After that, it just goes downhill. The writers just couldn’t think of anything that could top the concept itself. It’s still not a bad movie, and it has a few cool ideas, but the full movie just can’t live up to the trailer.
Don’t Worry Darling is pretty much the same way. The trailer shows an ideal, almost utopian community from the 50s or 60s, but you can tell something dark is going on behind the scenes. Unfortunately, when you see the full movie, the actual twist is nowhere near as cool as whatever you were building up in your head.
Smile wasn’t bad. I enjoyed it, I really did. But it wasn’t nearly as creepy as the movie I thought I was going to see. It doesn’t help that the coolest scene in the trailer turns out to be a dream in the film itself. Given the title of the movie and all the smiling people in the trailer, I thought the smiling aspect was going to be a bigger part of the plot. But it’s more of a standard killer ghost story, and smiling before death is just one symptom of its curse. Note that Smile was also based on a short film.
A little off-topic, but I absolutely hated Cabin Fever (2002). It doesn’t really fit the “creepy and unsettling” theme of this blog, but it’s a great example of a horror movie with misleading trailers. I knew it was about a disease, but I thought the disease would make people attack each other like zombies. But no, it’s just about a quick-spreading flesh-eating virus. People catch it, they get sick, they die. I know it sounds like I was just disappointed that it wasn’t a zombie movie, but even for what it is, it’s a snoozefest. It never goes anywhere particularly interesting, and some of the characters are downright annoying.
The bottom line is, some movies just work better as short films. And sometimes the people who edit trailers are more competent than the people who write movies. But none of this is going to stop me from seeing the next cool-looking movie with a five-minute concept. You might say I never learn, but the truth is, I just have nothing better to do with my time.
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