10 Amazing Trailers That Tricked You Into Seeing Terrible Horror Movies
Save yourself the ticket price, all the best scares are in the trailers anyway.
You'd think in 2021 we'd stop getting suckered in by trailers.
Audiences have been burned so many times before at this point, whether it was thinking the original Suicide Squad was going to be a genuinely great film or catching a teaser for the next Netflix bargain-bin horror you briefly thought might actually be worth clicking on.
This is the entire art of trailers though: getting you hyped for things you know in your gut will probably never live up to the promise of the marketing. This is especially true for horror movies, where often the advertisements are front-loaded with the scariest scenes and don't have the time to dwell on the bad dialogue that can easily tank a film's atmosphere.
As a result, us horror hounds are often chomping at the bit for movies that end up letting us down. Sometimes that's only a slight disappointment like Goodnight Mommy, but other times great trailers have resulted in movie-goers splashing the cash on day-one tickets only to come out of the theatre wondering why they were ever excited in the first place.
10. A Cure For Wellness
If you're particularly scared by mouth-horror, you probably remember the marketing for A Cure For Wellness. The trailer teased the story of a man who gets trapped in a super creepy wellness centre that's clearly up to no good, offering quick glimpses at the kinds of horrifically weird practices the "doctors" put patients through while there.
Keeping things mysterious, viewers are given quick shots of a drill going into someone's mouth, patients submerged in water and peculiar parasites in the drinking water. What does it all mean? Who knows! But it looks big, lavish, and spooky, and promised an imaginative return to the genre for director Gore Verbinski.
Of course, all of that is still true of the finished film, but only in part. At a sprawling two-and-a-half hours in length, A Cure For Wellness features just as many good ideas as it does bad, but its convoluted plot, not entirely convincing acting and wonky tone ultimately results in disappointment.
It's cool to see a director go completely nuts, but you can't help think there's a better, tighter horror film in there somewhere.