Quentin Tarantino names the greatest movie trailer in cinema history: “It’s too good”
Trailers can ruin a movie. We’ve all been there, trapped in a cinema, waiting for the film to start, only to be forced to watch a series of spoilers for other movies that you might have been excited to see, but which you now know the endings of. Comic book movies are notorious for this, but it isn’t a recent phenomenon. 25 years ago, the Cast Away trailer showed very clearly that (spoiler alert!) Tom Hanks makes it off the island alive. One of the trailers for The Godfather Part II showed a major character getting shot (I won’t dignify the blunder by revealing who).
Back in the day, this sort of thing never happened because trailers were a whole different ballgame. They used to just be a shouty voiceover in which you were told, in no uncertain terms, that the film was going to be ‘a sensation’, accompanied by a list of actors’ names. Alfred Hitchcock made things a little more fun when he started doing his own trailers, appearing, like a children’s TV host, in a library or drawing room to playfully lecture you about his upcoming picture. They are cinematic gems unto themselves.
Sometimes, trailers are so bad that they actually feed you lies about the movie. In very rare cases, they actually provide an accurate preview, make you beyond excited to see the film, and give nothing away. Christopher Nolan hasn’t pretty much nailed this art form. Then, there are the trailers that oversell their product. On these occasions, the trailer is so much better than the film that it makes you wish the artist who cut it together had also been brought in to edit the whole movie.
It is in this latter category that we find Quentin Tarantino’s favourite movie trailer of all time. In his 2022 book Cinema Speculation, which he wrote while avoiding making his final feature, the Pulp Fiction director sings the praises of the preview for the 1979 movie Hardcore. This is very on-brand of him. The man is a sucker for sexploitation and revenge movies and has done his best to bring their influence into his work (Grindhouse being the obvious example).
Directed by Paul Schrader, Hardcore is true to its title, following a conservative businessman (George C Scott) who goes looking for his missing daughter who he believes has been trafficked into the snuff film and porn industry in California. It is a relentlessly bleak, seedy quest that divided critics, but the trailer was pretty flawless, promising to take the viewer “into a world that has never been dealt with in a major motion picture.”
“Columbia Pictures cut a dynamite trailer for the picture that featured all the sex-for-sale bright red lights of the milieu, Jack Nitzsche’s terrific hellish electronic theme, George C Scott’s intense anguished face, and female costar Season Hubley’s cherry-red messy lips pouting around in her silver satin pants,” Tarantino wrote. But he was also quick to point out that the trailer is not just good — it’s too good. “You just kind of get the sense that no fucking way is the finished film gonna deliver the way the trailer does,” he says.
It’s not just the perfect pacing, emotional juxtapositions, and suggestive clips that create this impression; it’s the actual narration. At one point, the voiceover intones, “Nothing you’ve ever done, seen, or imagined can prepare you for the experience.” That is an impossible statement to live up to, though the film does feel transgressive and deeply upsetting even by 21st-century standards.
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