'You're Next' Trailer: Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" Is The Perfect Soundtrack

Submitted for your approval: Exhibit A in the argument that a good song can make a mediocre trailer much more engrossing than it actually is. The word-of-mouth on the Adam Wingard-directed You're Next is pretty strong, but, shorn of its music, this trailer doesn't break any new ground. In fact, it reminds me a bit too much of the trailer for the 2008 home-invasion thriller, The Strangers, with Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman. (Same shit, different masks, you could say.)

Happily, the first thing that gets cued up before the body count starts growing is Lou Reed's "Perfect Day," a beautiful, romantic tune (reportedly about his relationship with the woman who would become his first wife, Bettye Kronstadt) with an unsettling subtext.   Although the line isn't actually heard in the trailer,  near the end of the song, Reed repeatedly sings the ominous line, "You're going to reap just what you sow."  Since I seem to be quoting the New Testament a lot today, the lyric refers to a line from Galatians: "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

The Perfect Soundtrack

Even if you don't know that and don't pay close attention to the lyrics, Reed laces his performance of the song with the melancholy darkness of that line, and it ends up being the perfect soundtrack to the sequence of events unfolding in the You're Next trailer: the snuggly, warm feeling of the family reunion gives way to horror and the barest of hints that the invaders in animal masks are going to reap what they sow.

Give the music supervisor a cookie full of arsenic.

Now, can somebody point me to a trailer that uses an excerpt from "Street Hassle" as its soundtrack?