Our Coming Attraction: 18 of the Greatest Movie Trailers Ever Made

I must admit that I originally greeted news that Danny Boyle was making a third fast zombie movie with my usual sigh and roll of the eyes – what, yet another sequel? But then I received a message from a film buff mate saying: “Holy s**t! Now THIS is a f***ing trailer!”

He wasn’t kidding. You will have no doubt seen that the preview for 28 Years Later went viral because of the alleged Cillian Murphy zombie, but that wasn’t what got my juices flowing. Instead, it was exactly what a trailer should be: A perfect blend of imagery and sound without giving too much away, turning eye-catching footage into a mini-movie that is enjoyable in its own right. 

I felt my pulse rate steadily increasing as it went along, largely thanks to the nightmare-fuel poem on the soundtrack that escalates into madness. At first, I assumed it was sampling some crackly radio broadcast from the film, but then I learned that it was a recording from 1915 of Taylor Holmes giving a sinister recital of Rudyard Kipling’s “Boots.”

All I can say is wow. I’ve watched the trailer several times and it still gets me going. I’m even mildly excited about the movie now, and here’s a prediction: I think it might start a new trend of spoken-word needle drops on thriller and horror trailers for the next few years.

So that got me thinking about trailers, perhaps one of the unsung artforms in the movie world. These short films have come a long way since their humble beginnings in the silent era, when they “trailed” the main feature – hence the name. The first example appeared in 1913 and, for the first five decades or so, they were pretty rudimentary affairs, giving audiences a rundown of the plot, a few brief scenes, and making bold claims about the upcoming attraction (“A love affair you’ll remember as long as you live!” trumpeted the trailer for Gone with the Wind).

Over the years, trailers eventually became small works of art in their own right, growing into a multi-million dollar industry after the advent of the Hollywood blockbuster in the 1970s. Ultimately, the most sought-after and anticipated trailers would sometimes become the star attraction themselves. Prior to the release of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, stories emerged that eager fans were buying tickets for the main feature just to catch the preview for George Lucas’s long-awaited prequel.

The same year as The Phantom Menace arrived saw the inaugural Golden Trailer Awards, established to celebrate “the people who condense 120 minutes into a two-minute minor opus.” Winners on the night included The Matrix, The Blair Witch Project, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, and 8mm, with Seven taking home the Best of the Decade award.

That line-up represents a kind of golden age of trailer-making and (spoiler alert) there are quite a few from that year in this list. There have been many more memorable previews since, some of which have showcased innovations that have become tropes in the industry. Let’s take a look at some of the best over the decades.

Citizen Kane (1941)

As we’ve already mentioned, old-school trailers tend to be pretty formulaic affairs. Leave it to Orson Welles to shake things up a bit, showing as much wit and innovation in the preview for Citizen Kane as he did in his cinema-changing masterpiece.

Welles remains off-camera as he calls for a microphone – just a few years after he rocked America with his broadcast for The War of the Worlds, he was no doubt aware that everyone in the nation would be familiar with his distinctive voice.

He then riffs on the classic format of introducing the cast as well as throwing in a gaggle of chorus girls (for the “ballyhoo,” he dryly notes). We also get a little about Charles Foster Kane himself, although the details of the plot are kept almost completely in the dark. Mirroring the mystery of the story, we are left to infer exactly who Kane is from a sequence of characters talking about him on the phone.

It’s a pretty light-hearted trailer, and in between we get little glimpses of the filmmaking prowess that is on full display in the picture: Noirish lighting, striking shadowplay, ceiling shots, dutch angles, and whip-pans to a series of actors. One thing that caught my eye was how one actor pops up from the bottom of the frame, anticipating Rita Hayworth’s famous entrance in Gilda. Welles and Hayworth started dating in 1941 and divorced the year after Gilda was released – I wonder if it was Hayworth herself, perhaps with an insight into her husband’s cinematic box of tricks, who suggested using the striking shot to introduce the character?

House on Haunted Hill (1959)

“I’m Vincent Price, and you’re invited to my party at the House on Haunted Hill, where so far the ghosts have murdered only seven people. So won’t you come and make it… eight?”

If Price wasn’t already a horror movie icon, he would have made a superb trailer voice-over guy with THAT voice. Director William Castle was well-known for his gimmicks and this short but effective preview features a lot of screaming and plenty of highlights from the movie. It also makes the most of its star’s droll ghoulishness, giving Price the chance to introduce the flick with some choice lines that capture its playful house-of-horrors vibe. 

Psycho (1960)

Only a showman director as famous as Alfred Hitchcock could get away with a trailer like this. With his typical macabre charm, the Master of Suspense takes us on a tour of the Bates Motel and family home, teasing the main events of the movie with deadpan glee.

The emphasis of the trailer seems to be mis-directing the viewers regarding the identity of the killer, repeatedly intoning the word “woman.” He even reveals the location of the famous first murder, which makes it somewhat surprising that the notorious shower scene came as such a shock to so many cinema-goers. The attention-grabbing cherry on top is the disclaimer that Psycho is a film that you must see from the start, stating nobody would be admitted to the theatre after it started. Given that Hitchcock throws so many spoilers into the trailer, it’s clear that the stipulation was largely a publicity stunt to pique the interest.

Dr Strangelove (1964)

Stanley Kubrick had already made some very good movies by the time his first masterpiece, Dr Strangelove, opened several months before Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe tackled exactly the same subject: The ultimate nightmare scenario of all-out thermonuclear war. Yet while Lumet’s by-the-numbers account is largely forgotten, Kubrick’s film is hailed as one of the greatest satires in cinema history.

The trailer for Strangelove takes a similarly striking and irreverent approach. Graphic designer Pablo Ferro gets right in your face, cutting fast between huge title cards and images from the film while cheekily dropping in soundbites to convey the plot and tone. It eventually settles into something more conventional, but that first 90 seconds lets you know this is a film ahead of its time. Interestingly, the Strangelove trailer also influenced elements of the preview for Fail Safe, albeit deployed with far less gusto in an otherwise standard story rundown.

The Exorcist (1973)

This “flash face” trailer still gets my heart racing even though I’ve seen the movie about a dozen times, so I’m not surprised it freaked out viewers of a nervous disposition when it first screened in theatres ahead of William Friedkin’s diabolical horror.

Opening with the iconic scene of Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) arriving at a mist-shrouded house at night, we are then subjected to a sequence of intense strobe-like images of Regan (Linda Blair) and the demon who possesses her, all accompanied by Lalo Schiffrin’s terrifying strings. Schiffrin had conducted a full score plus additional music specifically for the trailer before Friedkin discarded his work. The director used a combination of modern classical music and Jack Nitzsche’s original score instead.

The trailer was pulled from theatres after stories emerged from test screenings that audience members suffered from seizures and vomiting, which doesn’t seem too far-fetched nowadays when movies and TV shows containing strobe effects come with trigger warnings. Warner Bros rolled those tales into the marketing hype for the movie, resulting in the first proto-blockbuster as people flocked to see what all the fuss was about.

Jaws (1975)

“There is a creature alive today who has survived millions of years of evolution without change, without passion, and without logic. It lives to kill. A mindless, eating machine. It will attack and devour anything. It is as if God created the Devil and gave him… Jaws.”

Wonderful hyperbole here delivered by Percy Rodriguez, who was Hollywood’s go-to trailer voice-over guy before Don LaFontaine made the role his own in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Set those words to John Williams’ iconic theme and footage showing an unseen killer shark hunting an unsuspecting swimmer, and you’ve got yourself a smash-hit trailer.

Arguably this trailer would have been more effective if it just ended after that spine-tingling opening rather than moving on to a blow-by-blow account of the story, but that first sequence of words, music, and imagery is still so powerful.

Alien (1979)

As stars speed past the camera in the opening seconds, audiences might have been forgiven for thinking Alien was just cashing in on the recent Star Wars phenomenon. In some senses Ridley Scott’s slasher-in-space was since George Lucas made sci-fi hot again, but it is clear from the remainder of the trailer that this movie is a very different beast.

We get unsettling extraterrestrial sounds, a barren alien landscape, and a weirdly unnerving reveal of the title before we see… a chicken’s egg. As with the film’s famous poster, a regular poultry ovum was used for the trailer. But suspension of disbelief is completed when the egg cracks open to reveal a sinister light shining from within, then we are thrust into expertly edited sequence of shots from the movie that leaves us in little doubt this is no feel-good space opera.

Cleverly, the shots are used without giving hardly anything away – I like how we see Ian Holm convulsing, but no clue as to why his character is freaking out – before the legendary tagline drops at the trailer’s conclusion.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)

The 1980s wasn’t a great period for trailers overall but the artform entered arguably its golden period in the following decade. This spectacular teaser for James Cameron’s Terminator 2 features no actual footage from the movie itself, but it did a great job of pumping audiences up for the coming event with a driving score and tantalising glimpses of the Cyberdyne T-800 production line.

To top it all off, we get to see the finished product – Arnie looking absolutely ripped and eyes glowing red with cyborg menace. Wisely, the trailer gives no indication that he is playing the goodie this time around.

Independence Day (1996)

Everybody and their dog was at the cinema to see Independence Day when it first came out – it was a true blockbuster event. That may have been in large part to this fantastic teaser that promised spectacular city-wide destruction on a scale that we’d never seen before.

Later full-length trailers were basically mini-versions of the film, but this is the one that really captured the imagination, sealing the deal with the money shot of a vast flying saucer blowing the White House to smithereens.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Apologies for cluttering up this list with trailers from 1999, but it really was a great year – you’ll notice I have omitted the highly-rated preview for The Matrix because something had to give!

In a world of glossy big-budget trailers (see what I did there?) the original teaser for The Blair Witch Project had such a jolting impact. Sticking to the lo-fi nature of the film itself, it opens with the famous title card explaining that three students disappeared while making a documentary. Then all we get is some grainy images of wintry woods, unfathomable darkness, and some unhinged screaming. It showed us almost nothing of the film itself but tapped into that primal terror of being lost in the dark. It made my blood run cold when I first saw it in a packed cinema, and I also knew this was one movie I absolutely had to see.

Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)

This was such a great trailer to get suckered by. I remember sitting among a full house when it first appeared and nobody present seemed to notice that the special effects were a touch cheesy for what appeared to be a Star Wars trailer. Everyone was eagerly awaiting Episode I and we all watched with bated breath as the preview took us inside a Death Star-like lair to see a bald figure seated with his back to us peering out of a very Star Warsy window.

“Years ago, a battle was fought and an empire was destroyed. Now, the saga will continue…”

Some Vader-esque heavy breathing and music tantalisingly close enough to John Williams helped complete the illusion before the chair spins to reveal Dr. Evil (Mike Myers) and his skinny cat, Mr Bigglesworth. “You were expecting someone else?”

Everyone in my screening just lost their minds as the trailer crash-cuts to Austin dancing against flower power backdrops. Perhaps to allay the wrath of George Lucas’s lawyers, the voice-over guy suggests: “If you see only one movie in 1999, see Star Wars…”

This cheeky trailer was a double-whammy: Not only were we suddenly up for a new Austin Powers movie, it also managed to contribute to the massive hype surrounding The Phantom Menace. Genius marketing!

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)

With the proliferation of sequels, spinoffs, TV shows, and video games all bulking out the vast Star Wars canon nowadays, it is hard for anyone who wasn’t there to imagine just how much of a big deal George Lucas’s first prequel was. The Special Editions aside, we had waited over 15 years for a new Star Wars movie, and I can’t tell you how hyped I was when this trailer first dropped.

Some outstanding world-building here set to John Williams’ Skywalker Theme as the title cards get our juices flowing further: “Every generation has a legend… Every journey has a first step… Every saga has a beginning…” I’m so glad they gave the voiceover guy the day off for this one because it is far more evocative this way, especially as Darth Vader’s breathing comes in. 

Then, it becomes a pure blast of exhilaration as the Main Theme kicks in and we’ve got Podracing, monsters, lightsabers, alien creatures, laser battles, fanboy favourite Darth Maul, and a much-quoted monologue from Yoda: “Pain leads to suffering…”

I was big on Star Wars back then, but I fell into the camp of people who were deeply disappointed by the movie itself. Even so, I fondly remember that tremendous sense of anticipation leading up to it, and this trailer still gives me the Star Wars tingles.

South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999)

Don LaFontaine was indeed the don when it came to voice overs, lending his unmistakable baritone to many thousands of trailers and TV spots. He is best known for the “In a world…” trope that became so ingrained in popular culture that it even spawned its own movie, Lake Bell’s 2013 comedy In a World…

We could have chosen from any number of trailers to celebrate LaFontaine’s complete mastery of the phrase, but let’s go with South Park. Not only does he get to utter one of his most hilariously over-dramatic monologues, he also gets to list Saddam Hussein, Big Gay Al, and Eric Cartman among the cast members. It’s a cracking trailer, too.

The era of the voice-over guy was already in decline by the time LaFontaine passed away in 2008. Perhaps it had become a little corny by then, and trailer artists moved onto new techniques to hook the viewer’s attention. Nevertheless, hearing LaFontaine’s intonations today instantly transports me back to the multiplex in the ‘90s when he was the King of the Voice-overs.

Spider-Man (2002)

This is one of the greatest trailers to never grace our cinema screens at the time. Rather than give us the usual highlights reel of bits from the movie, it is a cracking standalone scene shot specially for the preview. We are thrown straight into the middle of a bank robbery as a highly-organised gang ransack the vault and make their getaway in a helicopter. But, just as they look home and dry, the chopper is suddenly yanked backwards through the towering skyscrapers of New York. Then comes the “take my money now” moment – the camera pulls back to reveal the aircraft caught in a massive web between the Twin Towers.

We can perhaps look back on the trailer now as a fitting tribute to the World Trade Centre, but it was deemed inappropriate by the studio in the wake of 9/11. Indeed, the terrible events of that September morning caused a lot of hand-wringing for studio execs who had movies set in New York coming out around that time. Some release dates were delayed while the Twin Towers were digitally removed from other films for fear of upsetting audiences with their presence. On the flip side, stories emerged that audiences cheered the landmark in movies where the towers were left in and Spike Lee resolutely refused to turn away from the tragedy, making it integral to the mournful tone of 25th Hour.

Inception (2010)

The original trailer for Christopher Nolan’s convoluted dream-heist thriller is fairly standard. Interspersed with money shots from the movie’s major set-pieces (such as Paris folding in on itself), it does a tidy job of outlining the mouth-watering concept and our main character’s motivations.

What made it stand out as one of the most influential trailers of the 21st Century so far is the use of Hans Zimmer’s score and the now-ubiquitous “Braaam” sound cue, which has since been repurposed in a variety of other trailers. Take a look at this compilation:

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1 (2014)

My favourite movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe also got one of the studio’s most irreverent and effective trailers. Guardians of the Galaxy was the 10th film in the MCU, by which stage we had already met the big guns: Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and Captain America. Continuing the franchise with a band of space cowboys that were little-known beyond fans of the comics represented something of a risk for Marvel, but the trailer for James Gunn’s sci-fi comedy adventure hit all the right notes.

The trailer establishes the playful tone of the Guardians trilogy by introducing us to Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), who in turn introduces himself to some bad guys as Starlord. “Who?” they ask. Many of our thoughts exactly, and then we get to meet the rest of his crew through a cheeky line-up sequence.

It was a clever way to endear audiences to lesser lights in the Marvel canon from the get-go. Add some action shots set to “Hooked on a Feeling’" and you’ve got the nostalgic vibe of the film with a sense it would give us something a little different in the franchise. Gunn and the Guardians didn’t disappoint.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

Before red band trailers became a thing, it probably flew under the radar of most movie-goers that the MPAA certification at the start of trailers was usually set against a green background. Now that studios increasingly rely on internet virality rather than just the old-school methods of transmission, they can get value from plunging money into alternative previews that include more extreme content (swearing, violence, nudity, etc.) for adult-oriented movies.

Some are purely for shock value, but the one that slapped hardest for me was the Red Band for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Within the first 10 seconds we have Oscar-winning Frances McDormand cussing up a storm, including a c-bomb that would have no doubt caused jaws to drop on the other side of the pond. 

The movie has a cracking soundtrack, and this RB preview expertly uses two songs that don’t feature in the film to capture the story’s tricky balancing act between tragic revenge thriller and black comedy. It starts out with folksy “Sleeping on the Blacktop” by Colter Wall before seamlessly transitioning to the Four Tops’ “Walk Away Renee” as we are treated to McDormand on her righteous rampage and taking absolutely no prisoners.

Hereditary (2018)

A24 have seemingly cornered the market in dread-infused trailers for their line in elevated horror flicks, and the preview for Hereditary tops the lot. The Guardian reported children fleeing from an Australian theatre after it was accidentally shown before a screening of Peter Rabbit, and I can’t blame them.

This trailer is steeped in the deeply unsettling atmosphere of the film while giving very little away. Much like the marketing campaign for The Sixth Sense, which focused on the kid who sees dead people rather than Bruce Willis, there is a clever mis-direct at play here. By homing in on the unusual-looking Charlie (Millie Shapiro) and her peculiar behaviour, it sends us down a blind alley of expectation that pays off with a shocking event in the film itself.

The use of sound also introduced a new trailer trope. In this case, it’s the repeated clicking noise Charlie makes with her tongue in the movie, used to punctuate the editing in the trailer and build tension. A24 would repeat the trick in other previews: the breathing sound in the Midsommar; the foghorn in The Lighthouse; and the sparking of a lighter in Saint Maud. Very effective. Skip forward to 2025, and its influence can still be seen in hotly-anticipated trailers like the latest Captain America adventure for Marvel.

So there you have it, some of our favourite movie trailers of all time! There were many more on our shortlist, but we didn’t have space for them all. What are your picks and why? Let us know!