The Trailer for Antlers Is a Pretty Terrifying Horror Movie All on Its Own

I think it’s suppertime!

Fox Searchlight

Trailers run somewhere between television advertisements and short narrative films in length, but their loyalties are almost always on the advertising side of the aisle. That’s natural enough: they are advertisements, and made under a truly bizarre set of constraints: a trailer editor has to take footage from a feature film—shots carefully staged and paced and photographed to work in the context of a 2 hour narrative—and somehow put together two minutes of footage that makes sense, makes people want to see the movie it came from, and (usually) doesn’t have too many spoilers. The current default option is a sort of slideshow of cool things that will be in the movie—see the most recent Star Wars trailer for an example—tied together with the score or a dirge-like version of a pop song. Legato, in other words. But staccato works too, as the trailer for Crazy Hearts director Scott Cooper’s upcoming film Antlers shows. The editor here was not afraid to repurpose the film footage into something with its own rhythm, and the result is a very effective horror movie in its own right:

The trailer has three acts, each with its own pace, and only the first section, in which child actor Jeremy T. Thomas’ character kills a skunk and feeds it to his very sick father, seems likely to reflect the filmmaking style on display in the feature version of Antlers. The second act, a musique concrète montage that alternates banal scenes of small-town Oregon with scenes from Thomas’ unique home life, is a lovely slow burn, cut almost entirely in synch with the methodical tick-tock of the score, building to a horrible reveal. The final act, ushered in by the strobe of police lights, is cut to a slightly faster tempo from the beginning, then goes doubletime on the first image of what is happening to Thomas’ father. There’s an appealing fuzziness here between sound and image: The score picks up the sound of Thomas banging a pipe on a fence, then repeats that sound in synch with flashes of light from a film projector, then repeats it a third time over a shot that tracks in toward a keyhole, this time dropping frames so that the camera stutters forward in synch with the score, as though the sound had infected the editing. And then after ratcheting up the tension along with the speed, we get four full seconds of pitch black, just enough to make the tension completely unbearable, before two glimpses of pure Cronenbergian body horror. If you wanted to tell the story of Antlers in under two minutes, it’s hard to imagine a better way of doing it. If you want to hear the story of Antlers at feature length, you’ll get your chance on Jan. 1. Bring your own food.

Get Slate Culture in Your Inbox

The best of movies, TV, books, music, and more, delivered three times a week.

from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/31DNIkR
via IFTTT