In this trailer, the audience are immediately shown the style of the film. In the first scenes, we see a normal couple in their house acting out what seems to be a daily routine with the wife washing up and the husband sitting in the living room. This immediately connotes the normality of the place the couple live and also that the life itself is dull by the bleak look on their faces and how they are presented in silence, connoting how they are trapped within this normal life until the windows breaks.
This act signifies the break in routine as their whole world begins to change, especially for the man who watches as his wife is dragged out the window and under his house in mere seconds while he is powerless to do anything. The silence from before makes this scene particularly shocking since it is the first noise the audience hear which puts them edge immediately and only grows as they watch the thing kidnap the woman. All these represent the classic horror style and genre which shows the direction this particular vampire film has taken as we don't actually see what takes the woman. The audience are left shocked and guessing what it was in the space of a few seconds so assumptions start being made and questions asked about what the creature was and looks like with the answer actually not being revealed to half way through.
Next we see a series of titles and short scenes which are used to establish the area where the film is set which is Alaska. These shots are used to increase the fear within the audience and enforce that it is a horror style film since we see how barren the environment is and how the vampires are stalking the area in the brief scenes, all of which mean that there is no one around to help the people of the town. Even more when we see that night lasts for 30 days in one of the title screens which the audience knows is beneficial for the vampires and increases the fear tenfold. We see the vampires circling a member of the town which used to enforce that these vampires are truly evil and are the sole antagonists within the film as when we see the actual appearance of the vampire, the black eyes and savage styled teeth all connote an animalistic side to them and also takes away any emotion from them to increase their evil qualities further since they are obviously void of them as we see them tear a victim apart at the end of the trailer.
Yet we also them as clever when they use a human as bait to lure others out, representing them as much more twisted versions of vampires compared to films like "The Vampire's Assistant" or "Twilight" which are teen genre films so this film wants to make these vampires appear negatively as possible so the audience become more afraid of them throughout the trailer. An example when we see one using their claw to play a record player, displaying some sick sense of humour that the creatures have as they massacre the village.
In the trailer, there is also elements of psychological horror within the trailer. Its much subtle then the shock tactics of the majority of the trailer as most stems from the man in the jail cell who taunts the survivors about the approaching vampires by speaking cryptically. He says things like "that cold aint the weather, its death approaching" and "board the windows, try to hide" which make it seem no matter what they do, the vampires will get them evident by the out of focus shot of a vampire pressing against the police station window.
Another example of this psychological aspect is when one of the characters says they must be vampires but another says they don't exist. Obviously the audience know they are vampires by seeing them throughout the trailer and by how they look yet these scenes are used to make the human characters more vulnerable as it would be hard to accept the fact they are actual vampires. It is used to make the audience more scared for themselves and the characters since in human nature we are afraid of the unknown and the new which is what these vampires are to the characters as they don't know what they truly are, how to kill them etc. All these unanswered questions just lead to panic and fear as they begin to doubt themselves because vampires shouldn't exist but yet they do and are tearing through their homes wanting to kill them, making them feel helpless and hopeless as they try to survive.
The overall tone of the trailer creates a really bleak image as there is no surrounding towns, only barren frozen wasteland so they are unable to call for help. Sunlight won't return for 30 days so the vampires can walk freely throughout the town. The situation for the characters looks incredibly hopeless so this makes the audience form a stronger bond of believability with them as it makes the audience think what they would do in that situation themselves and want to sit through to the end to see if they make it out alive, fitting in with the codes and conventions of this horror/psychological horror by making the audience ask questions about what's going to happen. But the roots of the film lie very closely to traditionally horror through the use of a clear antagonist, use of shock tactics to startle the audience through events that you expect to happen but still jump and some events that you don't expect along with the dark tone created though the lack of colour whilst heavy on reds and blacks. In the title for example which is stylised like blood splatters and in clear red which is used to connote the nature of the vampires within the film as they leave a trail of blood wherever they go and also is used as a recognisable symbol for vampire films since the technique is used for a variety of films so when we see the title stylised like blood or uses red, we immediately associate it with a horror or vampire film by the message it connotes which can range from the carnage caused by the creatures to the nature of the film itself depending on if the writing is archaic like it was in this one from the messy splatters of blood to from the title.
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