The Watchers

Today we'll listen to the trailer for a supernatural horror film called_ The Watchers_, directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan, daughter of M. Night Shyamalan. This trailer features a song that fits seamlessly, while the film’s monsters are effectively woven into the trailer through the eerie sounds that they make since we never see them. The song is Sinéad O'Connor’s “Never Get Old” from 1987–a legendary Irish singer to support a film set in Ireland.

“Never Get Old” comes in as the trailer starts, giving us a hauntingly repetitive vocal note plus an ominous low droning synth. It’s simple, leaves space, and sets a mood. A parrot belonging to Mina (Dakota Fanning) robotically echoes her advice “try not to die” at 0.05. At 0:08 O’Connor’s vocals sing “young woman with a drink in her hand,” aligning exactly with the visuals–by 0:14 we see Mina sitting in a bar.

At 0:26 as we hear O’Connor sing the title lyric “never gets old,” we see the logos of the production companies overlaid on an overhead shot of Mina’s car driving into the Irish wilderness. “Never gets old.” An appropriately threatening lyric for a horror film. Check out at 0:37, on the lyric “old” - we cut to a shot of Mina inside her car. The frequencies of the O’Connor track shift to suddenly give us the impression that this song is actually coming out of Mina’s car stereo.

But–remember that this isn’t actually the film we’re watching here. It’s a trailer, and trailers cut their own music, music that won’t necessarily be used in the film (of necessity trailers are much shorter summary edits). But here, we’ve made our way, over 37 seconds, through the opening sequence of Sinéad O'Connor’s song, and suddenly, this song has become diegetic (the characters in the story on screen can hear it too). This is unusual and very cool for a trailer.

Then from 0:38-0:42 the song starts glitching out. The digital display on the car stereo and the map on Mina’s phone glitch and then turn off. An orchestral riser helps whoosh us to complete silence at 0:43 as Mina’s car comes to a stop in the heart of a forest.

Mina gets out of the car, and we hear aggressive birds, soon joined by roaring, screaming, earth rumbling, an oncoming low-flying flock of angry crows, and an accent on a cinematic big drum. This tasteful organic creepy build takes us to a cut to silence at 1:06 as a woman opens a door a hundred feet from where Mina stands.

It’s a horror film, so we have dangerous creatures - “watchers.” And from 1:33-1:47, though we have no visual portrayal of what these monsters are, we have an unsettling cacophony of sounds they make - creaks, shrieks and groans. All this while Mina stares, confused and horrified, into a one-way mirror facing the forest. At 1:50, synched to the moment when the one-way mirror suddenly turns into a glass window, we have a single vocal note - a callback to the opening of Sinéad O'Connor’s song.

At 1:58 a low percussive tone starts pulsing like a racing heartbeat. At 2:13 a gritty low synth takes up the same rhythm. Over a montage of creepy night shots, deformed hands, skeletons, silent screams, we get the sense that Mina is trying to figure out who the mysterious watchers are. At 2:24, the pulsing synth abruptly stops, leaving space for the whispered cries of a dying man trying to open the door to the safe house. More silence and rattling takes us to a final accent note at 2:45, as a glass video camera screen is smashed. The sound of the smash reverberates, accompanied by more creaking and groaning monster sounds over the title card.

The Watchers is in theaters this Friday, June 7th.

— Jack Hui Litster