moon_custafer | Good afternoon. Here we have a quiet little motel....

Lately I've been thinking about how there's a type of movie trailer that you don't see much anymore -- maybe it was rare to begin with -- that emphasizes the movie as creation rather than the movie as story.

Let me take another run at that.

If the "In a world...." movie trailer shows you the world inside the movie, the kind of trailer I'm thinking of takes place firmly *outside* the movie: frex, the 1954 trailer for Rear Window starts with a short of Hitchcock and his camera crew, and later Jimmy Stewart breaks character and addresses the audience as himself; or Humphrey Bogart walks into a library, asks if they've got any good mystery thrillers "kind of like The Maltese Falcon" and is handed a copy of The Big Sleep.

It probably matters that both these examples are thrillers -- this style of trailer is good for indicating the genre and the stars (and usually the studio/director) without spoiling the plot. Hitchcock did a lot of these, but then he was the director famous for making cameo appearances in his own films, and Psycho was made around the time of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," so his hosting of the trailer might be a continuation of his role in the tv show. He walks us around the Bates' house like the world's worst real-estate agent, misdirecting us at every turn even before the movie opens...