Selling The Unknown with “The Veil”
When you’re dealing with a film that doesn’t sit neatly in one genre, the execution of the trailer becomes doubly important— and twice as tricky. Get it wrong and you don’t just confuse the audience, you actively train the wrong one to show up.
That was the challenge facing my 2024 cosmic feature, THE VEIL. I had written and directed film, but now that I was also acting as the trailer editor, I risked being too close to the subject matter to honestly assess it from a promotional standpoint. I might lean too hard into asking myself “What looks cool?” Instead of “what are we promising the audience?”. Thankfully, I had two great fallbacks to rely on: a killer production team to view my work objectively (shoutout to my co-producer Kyle F. Andrews!), and a previous track record in delivering compelling trailers for other likeminded indie filmmakers.
THE VEIL follows a retired priest who finds himself in a terrifying mystery when he shelters a young Amish runaway during a powerful solar storm. It blends the horror, sci-fi, and drama genres in (fairly) equal measure, all of which attract overlapping — but not identical — audiences.
Drama audiences want character, and emotional weight. Sci-fi heads yearn for fantastical ideas and impossible visions. Horror fans crave tension, dread and bloody release. That’s a lot to service in 90-120 seconds of runtime.
There were other key considerations baked into the project. THE VEIL is a contained two-hander, made on a limited budget without pre-existing IP or secured distribution. We couldn’t rely on prestige or star power, but we knew we could sell the film based on some key strengths: hypnotizing visuals by our cinematographer David Gordon, a thundering original score by composer Kyle McCuiston, and knockout performances from Sean O’Bryan and Rebekah Kennedy— a pair of performers whose stock was swiftly rising within the horror community.
Based on these factors, the call was made to sell THE VEIL primarily to horror fans. Since the film doesn’t trade in terrifying monsters or jump scares (okay, maybe just a few), so the nature of its horror had to properly calibrate the audience’s expectations. When it comes to marketing horror, atmosphere is more effective than exposition. At the same time, a good trailer has to convey story. Our story needed to be posed as a question, not an answer. A sense of mystery was the name of the game.
In the edit, this translated to sparse dialogue & careful placement of the most evocative lines. Most of the dialogue is heard as disembodied audio over image, cutting into the scene in question only sparingly. Just enough to establish character and emotional contrast. McCuiston’s score was the structural backbone, full of organic, trailer-friendly builds & hits that could bridge multiple cues and create an escalating musical tension.
Crucially, this structure allowed natural points to integrate festival laurels and pull-quotes from critics-- carefully curated so as to highlight the film’s specific appeal to horror fans instead of simply inflating the film’s prestige.
This structure made it easy to deliver cut-downs once the film began its public rollout. For THE VEIL’s World Premiere at the HP Lovecraft Film Festival, we were able to pull out an evocative fifteen-second teaser from this master trailer. This allowed us to lean even harder into the central mystery, tantalizing audiences at the festival before every screening and boosting the turnout for the actual premiere. The result was a packed house of several hundred enthusiastic cosmic horror fans (and one very distracting dog, but that’s a story for another day).
The single biggest test of the trailer’s effectiveness, however, was how it performed out in the world. Comingsoon.net debuted the trailer as an exclusive ahead of our showing at Austin Film Festival, and it was later accepted by our distributor without any further edits— a rarity, and a good sign that the trailer was doing its job.
In the rollout to our general release, the trailer was picked up by IGN Trailers and others, and the trailer has accumulated nearly 300,000 views on FilmFrontier Studio’s YouTube account alone. And that’s not even counting views and impressions on social media platforms, where the trailer was repeatedly seeded as part of a digital marketing campaign.
Now that we’re over a year removed from the film’s wide release, the trailer continues to draw new viewers in to its emerald-hued mystery. Its longevity is thanks to a simple promise made to the right audience. Instead of an explanation, the trailer stands as an invitation. By choosing restraint over coverage, and atmosphere over exposition,, the marketing aligned with the experience itself.
When it comes to selling the unknown, less really is more.
