How Does the Scream 4 Trailer Stack Up to Its Predecessors on the Hip-O-Meter?

I'm kind of in awe of the marketing team behind Scream 4. Years after Scream 3 opened to little fanfare and vanished into the Wal-Mart dollar bin, here they are trying to position Scream 4 as one of the must-see franchise movies of the year. And they're doing a decent job! Let's hear it for hype and the fickle pop-cultural collective consciousness! In any case, now that we've got an official, HD version of the trailer that leaked last weekend (and quickly disappeared), let's journey down trailer-memory lane to chart how the rules of the series (and its marketing) changed, how it lost its audience and how well the latest trailer does at rectifying that failure. I'll be awarding each trailer a score between 1 (Lame!) to 5 (Hip!) on the Hip-O-Meter (patent pending).

Scream

Guiding Marketing Principle:

Drew Barrymore! Lots of Drew Barrymore! She's in the film (spoiler?) for about ten minutes, but she takes up more than a quarter of this trailer. Beyond that ploy, it does a nice job positioning itself as a straight horror movie, then slowly revealing it's sly, self-conscious take on the genre.

Rules:

1. You can never have sex.

2. Never ever under any circumstances say, "I'll be right back!"

Pop Culture References:

Prom Night. Nice one.

Ghostface One-Liners:

"Hellloo Sidney!"

"Do you like scary movies?"

Fails:

The dated voice over, which might have worked then, but seems pretty silly today.

Hip-O-Meter Rating: 4.5

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Comments

  • XL2011 says:

    One big fail on the Scream 4 trailer though, a HUGE one in fact : way TOO MUCH informations. You can already see a few of the victims and the way they die, which is a huge turn off....

  • Brian Clark says:

    Hard to say - every time I thought they were making a joke or setting up a fake scare, Ghostface popped out! So maybe in the real movie, they turn that on its head even more and NO ONE DIES IN ANY OF THOSE SCENES.
    No, but really there's always so much of a chase and struggle in these movies for every kill, I'm not sure some quick cuts of ghostface about to go in with a knife actually spoil anything substantial.

  • XL2011 says:

    I get what you're saying Brian, but a particular scene clearly show one of the character getting stab (i'm not talking about Gale) and then the same character falling on a van... Plus the fact that we now know how ghostface is going to attack the blonde girl and the brunette one, the cops, etc...
    I'm sure not everybody is going to notice/remember what they saw in the trailer when they'll watch the movie, but still, it's a downer :/

  • Brian Clark says:

    Yeah, I feel you. I'll take a few spoilers over the utter incoherence of the Scream 3 trailer though.