Alien (1979) Movie Poster
What makes a movie trailer effective? Is it the mysterious nature of the plot? Is it the way it makes people excited for the film? Is it the success of showing viewers the world in a very short amount of time?
The trailer for Alien was able to accomplish all of these questions in under two minutes.
Of course, I'm going to be biased, but the greatest accomplishment of this trailer is how it uses sound to envelop viewers in the world, while simultaneously setting the tone for every emotional beat.
Let's dive a little bit deeper into the sounds of this incredible trailer.
The trailer opens with a full screen of black with some white specks sprinkled throughout the screen, implying that we are going through space. The sound opens with a low-frequency rumble and lots of low-mid frequency content that sounds like the beginnings of a thunderstorm. The typical sound of space is going to have this brown noise frequency spectrum because, although space is silent, popular culture associates the sound of space with this low "wind" and "rumble" noise.
Interspersed throughout this brown noise is an occasional ticking clock which makes the viewer uncomfortable, as if the trailer is building to something that could be potentially dangerous. This ticking clock also builds up the intensity levels in a subtle way when mixed with the other sound elements.
When we first see something that resembles a planet, the camera swoops over it and we get this rush of wind noise. At this point, the brown noise that we heard in the beginning, has turned into more of a white noise as the intensity level is more equal across the frequency spectrum. This coupled with the ticking is slowly building more and more intensity.
Just after we swoop over the planet and the symbols of the Alien title are beginning to come together, we hear this repetitive rumble coming from the low-frequency range. In my opinion, this is what makes the trailer's sound design so visceral and chilling. The rumble is in the form of consistent sixteenth notes centered around 150 Hz. This is in contrast to the ticking, which are eighth notes and much higher on the frequency spectrum. These low sixteenth notes propel the trailer to higher and higher intensities.
The white noise, clicking, and rumble form the groundwork for the sound of the trailer and are in large part most of the sound of the trailer. Later in the trailer, we hear what could be the sound of alarms and the sound of unknown creatures. These sounds together are somewhat hard to distinguish, which is later a subtextual theme of the movie (the relationship between aliens and what humans have created). The cacophony of sound at this point is building to a point where it must explode. Lastly, we hear the screams of various people on board the ship as well as a cat screeching.
All of the sounds I've mentioned build up into a jarring and disorienting swirl of sound that dissolves in a second once we visually remove ourselves from the ship.
Once all the sounds are almost completely dissolved, and we are outside of the ship in space, the film's tagline appears.
"In space no one can hear you scream."
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