Alien (1979)
Welcome to No, But I Saw the Trailer. Let’s kick things off with one of my all-time favorite movie trailers (a teaser, actually) — Alien.
Most trailers from the 1970s give themselves away via (A) a hyperdramatic narrator and/or (B) a flaccid pace. Until, say, the late ’80s or so, trailers tended to drone on a bit. Someone was just pasting footage together, creating a greatest-hits package in the allotted three minutes (sometimes longer). Over it all was a stentorian narrator SELLING YOU, DAMMIT, SELLING YOU on the flick, often repeating the title over and over. (If it was a comedy, it was Mr. Wacky Guy.) And sometimes there was music from the movie, none-too-deftly edited together so that you could hear the seams in the cues.
The Alien teaser doesn’t do any of that. There’s no narrator. There’s no music, other than weird sounds. There isn’t even any dialogue. It begins with footage shot for the teaser — a giant egg insinuating itself into the frame. Gradually the title fades up, line by line. Then we get an impressionistic montage of strangeness and stress. Where are we? Who are these people? What are they reacting to? We don’t know, but we sure as hell want to find out.
This trailer has a malign mystery about it. It plays peek-a-boo with us, revealing (not much), concealing, back and forth, and then there’s this absolute spasm of chaos and fear and violence and oh crap what’s going on and —
— and then the pressure valve is released and there’s a quiet yet ominous long shot of the Nostromo — we’re thinking, “Damn, all of that’s going on inside that ship, but outside it just looks pretty bland” — and then the justly famous tagline —
In space, no one can hear you scream.
And if you were in another ship passing by the Nostromo, you wouldn’t know. You wouldn’t stop to help.
No one is going to stop to help.
No one can hear you scream.
The Alien teaser contains all the dread and revulsion and climax we look for in great horror filmmaking, and it does it in 110 seconds. It is pure cinema.
I wish I knew who was responsible for putting this together (perhaps Ridley Scott himself? He did, after all, come from TV commercials), because he or she is clearly the patron/matron saint of this blog and anyone who looks at trailers as an occasional art.
A downloadable QuickTime version can be found here, as well as a longer trailer and one for the “director’s cut.”
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