Screamer Trailer - Television Tropes & Idioms

So you're sitting in a movie theater, minding your own business, when all of a sudden a trailer for a scary movie comes on! It looks cool and the plot is abo— blooD hatE deatH!— what the hell?!

Wow! That hidden frame/half a second flash cut with the scream sure was scary, more so than a Cat Scare, and the pale stringy haired girl was frea— PAIN EVIL KUMQUAT gyah! Okay, a little less scary, but still surprising.

So anyway. Trailers, films, and Video Games that can't rely on time to build suspense will use the Screamer Trailer to scare and shock with glimpses of the movies' monster, mayhem, or even random things, often paired with a scream or other scary and loud sound to catch the viewer by surpri— pIstAcHiO AVocADo iCecrEAm! Okay, you can cut it out now, it's not scary anymore.

In fact, this technique is quickly moving towards becoming a Discredited Trope from overuse. This still shows up played straight in several Internet videos premised precisely on this kind of scare. Some moviegoers have even become desensitized to the strobe light scare, and come to expect the last half second of every such movie trailer to contain one fina— Boo!

Contrast Subliminal Advertising.

Troper General's Warning: Strobe light effects can be hazardous to the health of small children, epileptics, or the overly cute. We recommend using Rickrolls instead.

Examples:

Anime

Neon Genesis Evangelion (and by extension, Hideaki Anno) loves this, though it is more frequently used to suggest the thoughts and feelings of characters than to outright freak out the viewer. Which is not to suggest that it doesn't do that as well.

Film

The classic example is Suspiria, which told you nothing about the movie except that the word "Suspiria" was highly relevant.
"You can run... from Suspiria...
13 Ghosts and House on Haunted Hill use the Screamer Trailer effect in-movie, as new ghosts are revealed or about to do something nasty to the heroes.
Most asian horror movies with a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl, such as The Ring.
- Although the trailers for the American version of The Ring were standard fare (and later ones even spoiled the infamous Well scene), the teaser trailer for The Ring Two is basically a full-fledged Screamer.
The sci-fi film Sunshine includes a possible subversion in a sequence within which the main cast's wandering through a seemingly abandoned spaceship is intercut with flashing images which, at first, look like closeups of human faces with far too much red...and are revealed immediately afterwards to be from a photo of the crew celebrating a birthday party against a red backdrop.
- And then it plays it straight with Captain "I've melted my skin off and can still live despite my blood bleeding blood from my blood".
- For some reason, having the worst case of sunburn in history also makes you impossible to be photographed/filmed/looked at, since the camera has this weird "perpetually out of focus/jittering" effect on him when he's onscreen. But that's just small pickin's compared to the Fridge Logic involved in how he should be long dead since having 100% of your skin burned off means you die.
No sound, but this happens several times in Fight Club, three or four times with Tyler Durden, and once at the end of the movie with a...male body part. (It was earlier mentioned that editing single frames of porn into movies was just one of Tyler's weird hobbies.)
- Said body part is from one of the directors. His comment: "Now I can't say that I didn't have a part in a major motion picture!"
The most recent trailer for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has one involving evil, resurrected Voldemort flashing on top of his younger Flash Back self in Albus' memories.
Parodied in Don't, a faux trailer in the Grindhouse double-feature. It was filmed by Edgar Wright, and stars Jason Isaacs, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost, all of whom are British, but none of them get to speak, as a parody of those trailers that keep the movie's country of origin a secret.
The trailer for The Fly II consists of nothing but a heart monitor beating normally which gets progressively faster with only the sounds of screaming when it reaches its breaking point. Surprisingly effective for a low-budget approach with no film footage.

Live-Action TV

These happen just before the cut to commercials in Ghost Adventures. They are definitely quite cre GAAGHHepy. It DOES NOT HELP that they are usually accompanied by a split-second shot of a Demonic Dummy with empty black eye sockets, standing on a static-y background.

Video Games

The trailer for Dead Space (a science-fiction horror game) starts out with shots of a spacecraft and its dead crew, accompanied with a creepy lullaby. About thirty seconds in, screamer scenes from the game start appearing. The trailer eventually fades more and more into the screamers, and eventually just plain features the gory scary bits.
- The sequel's trailer is even worse, as it's just scary bits with the rhyme playing over them.
Exmortis? It's one of the best flash games ever, you can see it at http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/189227
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare's trailer. Though it doesn't have the distorted sound effects and the transition happens at medium speed (except for the end where the whole trailer rewinds), it did a great job at getting the sinister implications and the tone of the plot through.
FEAR sometimes flashes images such as horribly disfigured faces.

Western Animation

Invader Zim had the episode "Mysterious Mysteries", where the host of the eponymous Show Within a Show has frequent flashes of a somewhat overenthusiastic-looking Dib, complete with sound bite.
- There's also a silent example that appears for a single frame in afew of the episodes involving Gir in "Duty mode" coated in blood. This was put in to spite the network when, due to Executive Meddling, the scene featuring the frame was cut.

Scream Discretion Shot

Self-Demonstrating Article

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