TRAILER TALK
Unfiltered, uncensored, uncompromising trailer reactions from team EMPIRE
Assessing the teaser for nightmarish horror Antebellum.
John Nugent (News Editor): Are people looking forward to this one? It appears to be a weird time-travel horror, set in modern times but also the Antebellum South. But we don’t know much about it. Alex Godfrey (Acting Features Editor):
I am very excited. It looks mad.
Ben Travis (Online Staff Writer): The directors, Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, mostly did music videos before. They did one for the recent Jay-z visual album called ‘Kill Jay-z’. It was really striking and stylish and attention-grabbing.
John: This looks really unique.
Ben: It almost feels like a lifestyle advert, these opening seconds. It’s very floaty and dreamy.
John: There’s a lot of what almost looks like stock footage. Joanna Moran (Photography Director):
Very aspirational.
Nick de Semlyen (Acting Editor): It looks like an advert for insurance. It’s doing that Get Out thing of using little bits of symbolism — the butterfly, which I think is really creepy anyway. I once went to a butterfly house. If you look closely at a butterfly, it’s got a little face. I’m already frightened of this film.
John: It seems to be wearing its Jordan Peele influences on its sleeve, with Get Out and Us namechecked. They share the same producer.
Joanna: What I like about this is I still don’t really know what’s going on. Is it like Get Out, where you’ve got some bad people behind it, or is it like a PTSD thing?
Alex: We assume she’s going back in time. It could be an ancestral thing?
John: The trailer seems to imply that you’re chosen, Battle Royale-style, and sent back in time to the Antebellum South, at the peak of slavery. I think it’s suggesting you are picked.
Ben: Maybe she’s been selected to go back and be a revolutionary leader to break down the system.
Alex: Quite arresting, isn’t it?
Ben: Some of this imagery is pretty horrific — oppressive and intense.
Alex: Jena Malone is pure evil in this film.
Joanna: You can tell because she’s got dark lipstick.
Chris Hewitt (Review Editor): Jack Huston, we have a problem. And it’s you. John: He’s got a bit of a Leonardo Dicaprioin-django Unchained look about him.
Joanna: I was just about to say the same thing — the smug old face and the punchable facial hair. Nick: It’s unnerving, the way it keeps cutting between the modern day and the past, so you never quite know what’s going on.
Alex: I like angry Janelle Monáe. I would really like to see her kill a lot of people.
Chris: Can we talk about the best thing about this trailer, though? The fact that it’s one minute and ten seconds long.
Alex: I have flashbacks to the Fast & Furious 9 trailer, which was about nine minutes long.
Nick: Antebellum does need a magnet plane, to be fair.
John: This is quite a crazy shot. She looks like she’s doing some extreme yoga.
Joanna: They’re playing up the horror-y stuff, aren’t they? She looks possessed.
Alex: It’s like the spider-walk in The Exorcist. Nick: Janelle’s wearing the Union army uniform there.
Ben: These little teases of the battle give you a sense of the scope of it. It gives you enough to set your mind whirring at the possibilites of how big it’s going to go. I think they’ve done a great job with this trailer, in letting you know what you’re in for but also not really telling you anything. Especially a horror trailer. So many horror trailers give away so much plot and jump-scares. This doesn’t really give away any of that. It’s great. Nick: That shot is amazing.
John: She’s set the outhouse on fire?
Ben: I guess that’s one of the things you get with directors who come up in music videos, where so much of it is purely in the visual compositions. The story is really intriguing, but the visual side of it looks so strong.
Joanna: The iconography is very Madonna’s ‘Like A Prayer’.
Nick: You had that with Queen & Slim a little bit — Melina Matsoukas is another director with a music-video background. She did a lot of Beyoncé’s videos. Really stylish imagery in that film, too.
Ben: It has a real energy and a sharpness.
John: I just really like that Janelle Monáe’s become a movie star.
Joanna: I stan Janelle.
Ben: The fact that her first two films, in the space of a couple of months, were Moonlight and Hidden Figures is pretty amazing. It’s great to see her stepping up as a lead, because she is a leader in everything else she’s done.
Alex: It looks really beautiful. I don’t know anything about these directors, but they’ve obviously got something new to offer. And I think Janelle’s got an amazing presence.