Trick Or Trailers: The Shining (1980)

The common wisdom says that when marketing a horror movie, you've got to hard sell the film's exploitation elements - the monsters, the violence, the terror. In step with that, horror movie trailers have typically gone for lurid, attention-grabbing come-ons ("To Avoid Fainting, Keep Repeating: 'It's Only A Movie, Only A Movie, Only A Movie...'") and challenges to the audience (how many horror trailers have dared viewers to test their bravery or issued 'warnings' about a film's content?). Director/producer William Castle (The House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler) built an entire career out of turning his movies into the equivalent of carnival attractions and a campaign like the one that's recently made Paranormal Activity into a box office sensation shows that the game plan for marketing horror movies hasn't moved too far from Castle's shadow.

But the original teaser for Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's novel The Shining took a daringly different approach. It abandons all conventional logic in that it's comprised of a single, unedited shot in which the camera never moves and there's no dialogue - not even voice-over narration. It has none of the things that horror trailers have always relied on to make an impression (not even darkness) and yet it's chilling in a way that few entire films are.

While today The Shining is such a part of the cultural lexicon that everyone is familiar with the image of the elevator doors cracking open to release a tidal wave of blood, in 1980 it was a startling sight. To this day, it remains the most unique horror trailer ever.