The Devil Inside Trailer and Poster Analysis

Poster

This Devil Inside poster above is very simple but very effective. It tells the viewer all they need to know about the film.  The main thing that draws your attention straight away is the woman on the right hand side of the picture. It is a woman with dilated eyes showing the audience her bottom lip. On it is the symbol of the Anti Christ, an upside down cross, this tells the audience instantly that this film is about the devil and is predominantly a horror. But if this symbol does not register with the audience they would be able to tell that it is a horror from the title, 'The Devil Inside'. The Devil Inside suggests a possession within the film which is accurate as within the lady in the poster is 'possessed'. The tagline 'No Soul is safe' also suggests to the audience that the film is a horror film, and is their to help try and attract more horror fans, then the date at the bottom allows the audience that like the look of the film to know when they will be able to see it.

Trailer

This is a Horror film Trailer, which is obvious from the content of the trailer, including strange things happening and jumpy moments. The film was released in January 2012 with the age rating 15 having being produced by William Brent Bell. The trailer starts with the statement that the call is an actual 991 call. This makes it that much scarier as this helps suggest to the audience that this is all real not just the call, making it more believable and more relatable, and what they are mainly going for, it will make it scarier. For a film like this it is almost essential for the trailer to be scary as the scarier it is the more it will attract the specified Horror target audience. It then goes on to a black screen where what is being said is transcripted on screen, it is a telephone conversation between a 911 receiver and a 'murderer'. The conversation is about how the lady on the line has killed 3 people, while supposedly being possessed by the Devil. After this conversation is a Insurge title, this is the production company which helped to make the film.

Next up is the start of the actual footage used for the trailer. It starts off with a shot of several characters within a Cafe. While in this shot you hear one of the character talk about how her mother killed 3 people while being exorcised. In this shot it sticks to the 180 degree rule, which states that the camera must stay on a certain side of the action, as not to confuse the audience.

There is then a transition that I am thinking of using in my trailer, it is a blur of black and white, which is what you'd expect when watching an old TV. This transition effect is used effectively to show that what the audience is viewing is old Television footage. They also use some sort of tint on the footage of the mum being arressted used to give the impression that it is old footage.

This this shot then swaps to a establishing shot when she mentions that the church got invovled with her mum after she commited the crimes. The city in the shot is most probaly Vatuican. This use of shot is used to allow the audeince

The next sequence of this section of clips is in the mental hospital meeting her mother for the first time since the murders. They have cleverly used Mise-en-scene to show the location of the scene. You can tell it is a hospital from the bland white clean corridors and you can tell it is most probably catholic as there are crosses on several of the doors. You also see another hint towards demonic possession as she randomly starts screaming and her mum also she shows the anti-christ symbol on the inside of her lip.

You see a scene now shot in a basement with a old bed in the middle with a 'possessed girl' on it. See shows her possession by popping her shoulder into strange and scary positions. They have used the technique of slowing increasing the speed of the trailer slowly drawing in the attention of the viewers. They decrease the length of the shots and increase the harshness of the transitions, by this I mean at this point they use Jump cuts whereas at the start they use quite a few soft transitions like fade. Then they speed up and make it a bit more scary which is an attempt to convince as many people who like Horror films that they will enjoy this film.

In conclusion this is a very good Horror trailer as it catches the target audiences attention very well and is very appealing to them. I believe to create a decent trailer, copying some of the techiniques in this would be very beneficial and help us create something attractive and appealing.