When Harry Killed Sally

The Post-Op Transgenre Trailer Movement

by Jonathan M. Silver

Question: What happens when over-the-top movie fans get basic editing software?
Answer: Meg Ryan gets killed.

The latest all-out viral craze is upon us. In basements across the land, self-taught editors are taking short clips from major motion pictures and reconfiguring them into a different kind of movie promo. The catch is that the reorganized footage completely changes the original film's genre. To a new generation of internet fans, The Shining will now be thought of as a coming-of-age romance, while Sleepless in Seattle is a blood-curdling horror film.



The common name for these types of videos is "Trailer Re-Edits," but I much prefer to call them Post-Op Transgenre Trailers -- or Tranny Trailers. These videos are funny and that's (mostly) the point. "People have always viewed their favorite films and characters in a very personal way, so it's amusing when someone introduces a completely different angle that they'd never thought of before," says Chris Rule, the creator of a re-edited Mary Poppins trailer." The simple irony of watching Mary Poppins as a homicidal maniac is side-splittingly hilarious.

There is a science to these videos. YouTube has hundreds of attempts at tranny trailers, but most of them don't quite work. Herewith, the three ingredients to a successful transgenre trailer:

Suggestive Footage: The footage used needs to be able to be misinterpreted. So the clips are often not the film's most famous moments -- instead they are the one-liners and subtle glances toward the camera. When Marty McFly says, "Hell I'm in it with you and I don't understand it" in the tranny trailer Brokeback to the Future, he is no longer discussing his task to fix the past, but his socially unacceptable homosexual relationship with Doc Brown. The key is to take the footage out of context.

Genre Music: Every genre has its own type of traditional music. Romances have sprawling happy strings while horror films have short, sharp shrieks. Putting shrieks under footage from Mary Poppins changes the mood and context instantly. Even more effective is using the soundtrack directly from another film. The key to making Taxi Driver's psychopathic Travis Bickle into "Mr. Big" is the theme song from Sex and the City.

New Text and/or Narration: Trailers need guides, and tranny trailers are no exception. Well-written text or narration can completely change the tone of the footage. In The Shining, when young Danny looks around a door and sees his entranced father, it's a moment of sheer terror. In the new trailer, the narrator explains that "sometimes all you need is right around the corner," turning this chilling scene into a Hallmark moment. If the narration or text tells an audience what they are looking at, they will believe it -- regardless of how ludicrous the suggestion may seem.

Individually, tranny trailers are just a bunch of people having fun playing around with footage. As a movement, however, they serve as a kind of social critique of the often intentionally misleading form that is the modern feature film trailer. These videos prove how easy it is to sway an audience with genre music, suggestive moments and a slightly tweaked narration. The blockbuster Marley and Me's trailer, for example, promotes a lighthearted family comedy, while the film ends up being a tear-jerking story about canine euthanasia.

Back in the day, trailers were simply a tool to represent the film and explain the premise of its story – as was the case with the original promos for The Shining and Cool Hand Luke. In the past 20 years, however, as competition to sell tickets has soared, movie trailers have undergone a facelift. Today's trailers typically include rapid cuts, hyper music, and lots of amped-up emotion -- regardless of the film's genre. In the face of this manipulation, tranny trailers have come along to show us all how easily we are swayed… but at least they make us laugh in the process.


Here are a few of my favorites:

When Harry Met Sally as a Horror Film


Taxi Driver as a Romantic Comedy


Sleepless in Seattle as a Horror Film


"Brokeback to the Future"


Mary Poppins as a Horror Film



Other links:

The original The Shining trailer


The original Cool Hand Luke trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRvnxMA2oJ8

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