The final trailer for Steven Spielberg’s latest film Disclosure Day opens by setting up a sci-fi story. We see close-ups of characters' faces as they look to the sky, and we hear sound design evoking the distant explosions and crackling fire lighting the sky, while synthesizers pulse away.

But then the trailer does something I have hardly ever known a cinematic trailer to do.

Directed by Zachary Wigon and distributed by Bleecker Street, Victorian Psycho originally had some different talent and distribution attachments, intended to be a film starring Margaret Qualley and distributed by A24. Instead, Maika Monroe stars—known as a “scream queen” (a woman prominently featured in horror films), in the vein of Jamie Lee Curtis or Jenna Ortega.

The first trailer or teaser for Christopher Nolans upcoming epic The Odyssey showcased the film’s grand Mediterranean vistas through IMAX cinematography, with a scant three lines of dialogue sprinkled in. This week, we’ll unpack the music and sound in the second trailer for The Odyssey, released May 5th. While there is a lot more story unveiled in this new trailer, the music stays pretty faithful to the tone of the first trailer.

A24’s Anthony Bourdain biopic dropped its first trailer last week, and we at Trailaurality are absolutely seated. Dominic Sessa stars as a young Bourdain in 1976 Provincetown—years before culinary school, and decades before Kitchen Confidential.

The trailer for Ridley Scott’s upcoming post-apocalyptic thriller film The Dog Stars makes great use of Van Morrison’s 1970 classic song “Into the Mystic.” The song is in, right from the opening shot, with acoustic guitar creating a tender backdrop as we see Hig (Jacob Elordi) and his wife playing with their dog. The moment ends abruptly at 0:11 with a jump cut to Hig alone in the same room, now with the lights out. The lighthearted guitar is replaced with the echoing sound of distant wind.

After being nearly permanently shelved years ago for the tax write-off, Wile E. Coyote has seen the light of day this past week with the first official trailer for the live action-animated Coyote vs Acme.

This week’s Trailaurality blog explores the official teaser trailer for Dune: Part Three. Hans Zimmer’s scores for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films have made exciting and creative uses of layered vocals (check out his theme for the Bene Gesserit), so it rings true that the music in this trailer features humming, chanting, and shouting. The trailer’s cut in three parts, each part more intense than the previous. 

The official trailer for The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping dropped on April 13th, and it’s a clear shift. The franchise that blended James Newton Howard’s careful orchestration with curated alt and folk soundtracks has just released a remixed The Who track from 1973 over its first full-length trailer, announcing this isn’t your parents’ Hunger Games. Or, maybe rather it’s your grandparents’ Hunger Games—being as it is a prequel set twenty four years before the original, and the aesthetic definitely leans 70s here.

Aleasha Harris has adapted her award-winning 2018 play Is God Is into a thriller film and it looks and sounds intense. Gritty, distorted bass guitar comes in with a low register riff at 0:03 and even though we see on screen a black and white shot of two young girls (Racine and Anaia) hugging on a park bench, the music foreshadows conflict.

Following its 2021 reboot (and before that, the 1995 and 1997 originals), one of the most enduring video game movie franchises returns for round two courtesy of Warner Bros.

Mandatory military service now complete, BTS are back. Their new album Arirang was released on March 20th, their first album since 2022. Netflix, longtime proponents of the Korean Wave (Squid Game, K-Pop Demon Hunters, etc.), are releasing a documentary about this historic comeback.

First announced in 2023, Guy Ritchie’s latest has finally found its way to a release window, with a trailer leaning hard into his signatures: silence with style, dialogue with panache, and a hard-hitting music drop.

This week we’ll listen to the trailer for The Testaments, a new Hulu tv series based on a dystopian Margaret Atwood novel set years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale. For the opening 19 seconds of the trailer we have voiceover from Agnes (played by rising star Chase Infiniti, who co-starred in One Battle After Another), as we see her present her dollhouse, with scene inserts of real people acting out the roles of the dolls she is describing. Meanwhile, the music sticks to gentle cinematic minimalism, slowly pivoting between two neighbouring notes using a voice-like synthesizer. It feels vaguely creepy, but we’re nowhere near horror film scoring. Yet.

Pixar's longest-running franchise is back for round five. The official trailer for Toy Story 5 dropped on February 19th, and while the teaser back in November leaned into INXS' "Never Tear Us Apart" as a statement of loyalty between toys and their kids, this full trailer takes a decidedly different tonal approach, trading a trailer deep in its feels for one that pivots towards a near-manic declaration of war against screens.

The official trailer for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film The Bride, set in 1930s Chicago, opens with the death of the title character (played by Jessie Buckley). At 0:06 we see the title character fall to her death in slow motion. Heartbeats begins to be heard, faint and slow at first. A frantic voiceover from the bride exclaims that she did not want any of this, and at 0:14 the heartbeat is now twice as frequent. At 0:18 we add the sound of a ticking clock (a motif commonly found in suspenseful trailers dating back at least as far as the 2017 Dunkirk trailer).

The first trailer for Spider-Noir dropped last week in two versions—"Authentic Black & White" and "True-Hue Full Color". The visual gimmick is eye-catching, but it's the sound that lands the sale of this mid-century reimagining of the wall-crawler.

GOAT, an NBA-inspired animated film, slams into theatres this Friday. It features a goat who becomes an underdog champion of roarball (like basketball, but played by animals, and more dangerous). To open the trailer we have a 6-second microteaser featuring basketball icon Stephen Curry (he’s a co-producer and voice actor in this film).

First shown at New York Comic Con, the teaser trailer for Daredevil: Born Again’s second season has surfaced online, and the choice of music sets the tone for where Matt Murdock's at for round two.

Euphoria, a tv series exploring coming-of-age storytelling through the filters of sex and substance abuse, is coming back for a third season on HBO Max. This series is adapted from a 2012 Israeli tv series of the same name. It’s fitting then that this American remake opens with a gospel choir singing the African American spiritual “Go Down Moses.”

It’s the top of the year, and that means it’s awards season—and we don’t just mean the Golden Globes! Each year, we hand out the most prestigious (in our opinion) and peculiarly specific awards to some of the most notable trailers in the previous year, with a particular ear, of course, to their use of music and sound.