Trailer Week – Poltergeist, 1982

If you’ve visited Burbanked with any kind of regularity, you know two things: a) I really love me some trailers and b) I really love to get all angry and grouchy when I think they’ve spoiled the movie. Trailers these days all seem to follow a predefined marketing path of mediocrity: show all the good scenes; tell all the good jokes; leave nothing to chance.

But it wasn’t always that way.

So I’m going off the beaten path a little, and this week I’m taking a look back at one classic, important trailer each day. By no means will this be a definitive list of the top trailers of all time – heck, I’ve only got five days. But these will be older trailers, for great, distinctive movies. Trailers with something special to show, that I remember as having a big impact on making me want to see the movie.

Let’s begin with the one where Spielberg really brought back the scary.

Of course, Spielberg didn’t direct Poltergeist, but mainstream audiences didn’t know who Tobe Hooper was in 1982. They sure did know the guy who had directed Close Encounters and Raiders of the Lost Ark, though, and the Poltergeist trailer picks that ball up and sprints down the field with it, using Spielberg’s name early on and quickly establishing the lovely suburban world in which Poltergeist takes place.

I wonder if movie marketers in ‘82 knew that E.T. would eclipse Poltergeist, and that audiences were more likely to see Poltergeist later in the summer, even though it opened about a week earlier. Because the Poltergeist trailer really recalls the world that E.T. is set in and is, in many ways, the anti-E.T. It tells a similar story – of uninvited, supernatural visitors and how they impact a suburban family. But it tells this story in a decidedly different way.

This is a great trailer. It starts slowly, but takes just long enough before it makes a left turn into Terror Town. The copious strobing lights and wind effects clue us in that something’s not right, but – in fine Spielberg style, at least in that timeframe – we never see the actual threat. It’s all implied horror – people reacting, terrified screams and faces – and whatever is abusing this family is left to our fertile imaginations.

And of course there’s an innocent girl speaking to a TV. “They’re here” indeed.

Watch the Poltergeist trailer and see if you don’t want to race out and watch this movie again.

The Movie List has a dandy page with what they’ve termed Classic Trailers – “trailers which are no longer (or never have been) available on the ‘net, have been Re-encoded, in high resolution picture and sound, and made available for Movie-List users”. That list is where I got the trailers I’ll share with you this week. It’s certainly a list worth reviewing if you don’t happen to have these titles and their attendant bonus features on DVD.

Coming up tomorrow in Trailer Week: the powerful debut of a new young director.