The 15 Best Movie Trailers Of 2015

13) The Visit

The trailer for The Visit did something that many thought had become impossible. It actually made us excited for another movie from M. Night Shyamalan.

The world wasn’t exactly screaming for a found footage film about scary old people, particularly from the man who brought us The Happening and The Last Airbender, but the surprisingly gripping clip from The Visit made audiences sit up and take notice.

It’s common for trailers to spoil pivotal scenes these days, but the promo for The Visit is decidedly old school in this regard, choosing to omit exactly why the children’s grandparents are acting the way they do. Sit up and take notice, Hollywood.

When the grandmother sweetly asks her granddaughter to climb into the oven at the end, it’s hard not to laugh, but this is more down to the creepy unease of the scene than poor filmmaking. In recent years, Shymalan’s succeeded only in making people laugh at the sheer shoddiness of his work, so this was a refreshing change of pace for him.

12) Magic Mike XXL

The beauty of the trailer for Magic Mike XXL is that those who made it know exactly why people want to see this movie… and it sure as hell ain’t for the nuanced script. It would have been easy to just show off Channing Tatum’s pecs and grinding dance moves, no one would have complained, but the filmmakers behind this trailer decided to go the extra mile with something a bit more intelligent.

For the first half of the promo, the words, “We didn’t want to show the best parts of the movie in this trailer…” are intercut between conservative clips where the dancing is surprisingly absent… that is, until the trailer teases with the words, “but it was very very hard to resist.” Extra emphasis on the hard there people.

The rest of the promo acts as any traditional trailer would, showing all of the footage one would expect from a movie about male strippers, but it’s that genius use of satire at the beginning which earns the clip a place on this list.

Well, that and every single moment Mr. Tatum’s chest blesses the screen with its presence.

11) Queen Of Earth

You may not have heard of Alex Ross Perry’s Queen Of Earth before, but the marketing for this powerful little indie is a stroke of genius and deserves to be seen by a far wider audience.

Taking inspiration from the melodramatic dramas it homages, the trailer for Queen Of Earth is literally a blast from the past, using everything from overblown dialogue to a ridiculously urgent voice over that demands to be re-watched again and again. Even if the final product wasn’t very good, (don’t worry, it’s as awesome as the trailer suggests), this clip works as a hilariously unsettling short film in and of itself.

Just make sure you wait until the voice-over guy reads out the credits at the end. For better or worse, they genuinely don’t make trailers like this anymore.