10 Movie Trailers That Totally Lied To Audiences

3. Scream

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTWf9QGdJCQ One of the all-time best instances of an audience being wilfully, brilliantly deceived by a trailer, the marketing for Wes Craven's superbly postmodern horror comedy Scream spent a good deal of its trailer suggesting that Drew Barrymore, who was hot property at the time, would be the protagonist of the film, the so-called "Final Girl", who would end up facing off against the killer and, of course, getting the upper hand in the end. The reality? SPOILER ALERT Drew Barrymore's character is killed in the first 10 minutes of the film, shocking audiences and helping to set a subversive tone that would follow through the entirety of the picture; it helped create an "anything goes" vibe that kept audiences on the edges of their seats until the lights came back up. If you're going to deceive audiences, this is how you do it; the tone of the film is clear from the trailer, but audience expectation is upended in a clever way that will please audiences rather than annoy them (except for the ardent Barrymore devotees, of course).