Mirrors Trailer Analysis

The film of this trailer that I am looking at is called ‘Mirrors’, it was released in 2008 and was directed by Alexandre Aja. The trailer starts conventionally, with soft day time scenes of a family altogether in their home. It then cuts to scenes of the father/husband of the family leaving a car and walking outside then into what looks like an abandoned building. There is a voice over from the film in this bit where we hear the father figure and another man who we presume is a police/detective talking about the building. We hear the other man say ‘the company wants us to patrol the premises every couple of hours’ and then later tells the main male character that the person who was working in this building was obsessed with the mirrors, making the audience question why and become curious and on edge. The scenes are then divided by a two logos from film companies/distributors and when it fades back into the film footage it is very dark and eerie and we straight away lead towards faster transitions and bad things happening. There is minimum amount of speech for about 25seconds as the man is just calling things out to whatever is in this building with him, and there is the sound over of screaming and crying which instantly connotes bad things to the audience. At the end of these 25 seconds there a black screen with texts comes up saying ‘The director of The Hills Have Eyes’, a unique selling point for this particular trailer as the film that they have mentioned was very popular and well-known, especially by people who are particularly interested in horrors. We then hear the lead male say ‘I need you to run a name for me’ whilst on the phone, we then see 4 fast clips, the first two being articles about the man whose name he’s going to run and the 3rd one is a long shot of the man and the 4th is a closer up shot of his face and shoulders. The next short scene we see is the man sobbing saying ‘I don’t want to die’ and in the next few shots we see how he dies and how it was his reflection that kills him. We then cut back to a scene with the main male and his wife in their home and he tells her he’s ‘seeing things’ it then does more quick transitions between shots showing some of the things he has seen, and then his voice over saying ‘bad things’. We then enter a longer scene once again, which is quite unconventional as once the transitions between scenes has become quick it tends to stay that way until the final shot. Within this shot we see the main characters wife walk into a room in which their sin seems to be talking to himself, but the woman then realises his reflection is not resembling her son as it is not following his movements. This is the realisation for someone other than the main character that there is something seriously wrong, and the young child doesn’t realise as he is naïve to and unaware of the strangeness and seriousness of the situation. We then get another series of quick transitions that start to get faster and faster, these scenes seem to match up and make sense even though within the film they may not even be close to each other. Sometimes trailers do this to make the audience think something has happened for a certain reason when it hasn’t, thus creating a false sense of fear and inquisitiveness towards what is going on, then if they then watch the film some events will become even more of a shock to them. After the quick transitions we then get the title of the film about 15 seconds before the end of the trailer, this is so that the name sticks in the audiences head for longer. The final scenes after the title of the film lead to two scenes after one another that create the jumpy tension that is conventional for horror film trailers, as if the final scare will hook you into wanting to watch it even more. To end it we then get a release date, to ensure that this also sticks into the audiences head.