3rd Personal Trailer Review - The Purge (2013)

NAME OF FILM: The Purge
YEAR RELEASED: 2013
GENRE OF TRAILER: Horror
MARKS AFTER VIEWING: 8/10

What happened in the trailer?

This trailer starts off slow, almost in a mellow tone describing a seemingly perfect world, where crime is low, unemployment is low, and the lives of one family who are a nuclear family (mum, dad, boy & girl) in a pleasant and stereotypically white neighborhood, signaling their wealth. Suddenly, we're cut to a montage sequence of CCTV clips of murder, and rioting as the inter titles read 'One Night a Year' 'All Crime is Legal'. It also shows this family discussing what the purge is, before the youngest child asks why they don't commit murder, and they simply reply 'because they don't need too'. What seems like a normal family wanting to keep out of the murder ensuing on the streets, turns deadly as a passerby is let in by the youngest daughter followed quickly by a menacing gang demanding the return of this person, or watch his family be murdered one-by-one. A quick montage sequence follows, with this gang killing off members outside the building, in all sorts of terrifying fashion, and the family inside the house now simply have to hide, pray and wait for the purge to be over if they wish to survive the night. 

Which positive, clever or interesting aspects do you think you could include in your own trailer? What generic features are fulfilled well?

Masks. Nothing is more terrifying than the use of prosthetic makeup, phallic weapons and the daunting masks in this trailer. The way that, the gang outside the house demand this person back, or simply state they'll murder whoever is left. I think also that the slow-fast pace editing of the trailer worked really well, as it's not easy to define a certain genre, or sub genre for this trailer having watched it, it starts relatively peaceful, just one family in a nice neighborhood, in a seemingly perfect world, quickly turned on it's head by one night.

Which aspects of the trailer did you think were unsuccessful and would put off it's target audience? How is it disappointing?

Back-story on the 'purge', we simply get a hashed reasoning from the father, saying that it's a way for people to use up the time on that specific day to let out any anger, and hatred they've built up without having to worry about police or emergency services intervening. I think a back-story would have helped, because there's a emergency broadcast that says 'Annual Purge' so we don't really get an idea of just how long this has been going on as a tradition. Second to that, because it goes from being a slow-fast paced edit, in the trailer there's a lot of scenes where it's just hiding and evading capture, this could in theory get a little repetitive and go from being a good trailer, to a bad film.

Why did this trailer receive the mark you gave it?

I gave this trailer a solid 8/10, mainly for the good reasons and the fact that as I've said it's a genre of horror that's not really been explored, there isn't any previous horror films that come to mind if you were asked to compare them to the Purge, so in that sense the 8 comes from the uniqueness of the trailer.