The trailer for The Purge begins positively by showing a happy family, but then cuts to graphic violence and the line "all crime is legal for one night a year". It becomes clear the film depicts a dystopian future where all crime is legal for one night annually. Later shots show a family barricading themselves inside and watching emergency broadcasts, building tension. The trailer then references the producer's horror films to signal the true genre. It ends by teasing intense scenes through quick cuts, leaving viewers wanting more answers and to see the full film.

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Trailer Analysis –
The Purge
Bradley Dimberline

2. The opening scene of this trailer shows what seems to be a family walking off
into the sunset holding hands. This image is a positive one and sets the film
up to be a happy family story when in actual fact is quite the opposite. The
subjects in this scene are all silhouettes connoting that they are walking off
into the distance and the story is coming to it’s end, however, because this has
been placed at the start, it could instead mean that the happiness and
solidarity in their family is coming to an end in place of the story that is just
beginning. We can see the sun coming up which could mean this scene is
taking place the day of the purge before it all starts so they can be together for
potentially the final time so they're trying to make the most of it. Along with
the positive image, the writing in the opening scenes are following the same
sort of positive theme with quotes like “unemployment is at 1%” “crime is at
an all-time low” again leading the audience to believe that this is an uplifting
film.

3. However, in this scene, we see the line “because one night a year” followed by
CCTV footage of people being viciously attacked either with weapons or
without. Most of these attacks show groups targeting one helpless person and
beating them to death. This is where we see that not all is what it seems in the
opening scene. The violence shown is separated from the happy family
smiling and waving by a second-long black screen reading “because one night
a year”. Because what we see comes from nothing and its quite confusing for
the audience as to why this is happening, the scenes and images come as quite
a shock to the audience making the actual scene look worse than it would do if
we were introduced to the film in a more negative light instead of seeing
happy families and positive figures showing things change for the better. This
is followed by the line “all crime is legal”. We as an audience then understand
why we saw what we did seconds before and from this one line, we get a big
picture for what we can expect to see in this film as it makes us think about the
chaos this would cause if it was a real annual “holiday”.

4. the first image shows a computerised security system that we wouldn’t see in
our reality. the word 'arm is usually affiliated with danger and preparing to
cause chaos in one way or another. in this format, the word is used on quite the
contrary as they're using this preparation to keep away from all the chaos that
is going outside, keeping the family safe because as we see on the second
picture, metal barricades are coming down from the top of the doors and
windows. from what we see here, they have gone to a lot of trouble and spent a
lot of money to get the highest standard of protection. soon after, the image of
an over the shoulder shot of the TV screen with the title of 'Emergency
Broadcast System' is shown and as an audience, we can start to anticipate how
extreme this one night of the year really is and how terrifying it would be for
just a normal family who don’t want anything to do with this 'holiday', this
starts to create a tense medium for the audience because we expect the worst.

5. Up until this point, there hasn’t been anything that would really scare the viewer
or make them feel uncomfortable in their seat. then we are shown a black screen
with the writing "from the producer of Paranormal Activity" "and Sinister" which
are widely known as films in the Horror genre and we start to realise that what we
have seen so far may not be what the film will be like throughout. after the second
film is mentioned, sinister, we are cut straight to an image that would make the
viewer feel quite intimidated in a way. the first thing we see here is of course the
man wearing a sinister-looking face mask looking straight into the lens of the
camera, which feels to the audience like he's looking straight into their eyes which
will make them feel like he's looking at them creating a more tense atmosphere. In
this shot, we are looking at CCTV footage from around the outside of house the
film is based in and we see people dressed strangely holding weapons which
makes us feel on edge like there's only going to be one outcome.

6. towards the end of this trailer, we see a quick sequence of short snippets of
different scenes that are filled with some of the more tense moments of the film,
for example the girl hiding under the bed with a boot right next to her face and
also the moments of action that we see, for example when the man who owns the
house goes to strike someone who broke in with a weapon. this shows the
audience that there is going to be a lot of scenes in the film where we are on the
edge of our seat and there will always be something going on so we wont be
bored. I would want to do something like this when it comes to making my
trailer because I can really show the audience a lot of action in a short amount of
time to get them excited about what they're seeing and make them want to see
more. using this technique towards the end is very cleaver because they're left
wanting to see more and it also leaves the audience with unanswered questions
that theyd want to look more into, the only way to do that would be to watch the
film itself.