You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …

The Product:
The Manchurian Candidate (the movie)

The Promotion:

The Pitch:
“If you come in five minutes after this picture begins, you won’t know what it’s all about! When you’ve seen it all, you’ll swear there’s never been anything like it!”
There, if we repeat all that a third time, it’s bound to work.

This is one oddball trailer. It contains no dialogue, from the movie or otherwise. It contains no narration. It has some text appear on screen, but only to give generic hype about the film being unique, not telling you anything that happens in it. And the footage used, while all actual clips from the movie, is edited into short, out-of-context bursts that leave you no clue what’s going on.

People sometimes complain about movie trailers that give the whole story away. Well, this trailer feels like it was made to do the exact reverse opposite of that.

Imagine it’s 1962 – you’re living in a time where “Manchurian Candidate” hasn’t become one of the most well-known concepts in fiction, referenced and recycled ad nauseum. If you weren’t familiar with the 1959 novel the movie was based on, you’d be watching this trailer with no idea what the film is about … and after the trailer’s over, you’d still have no idea.

It shows some weird and/or exciting looking stuff happening, but nothing to indicate what the actual plot of the movie might be. Because this trailer’s all about building mystery and intrigue around the film, making you feel like you’ve just got to go see it to find out what this all is about.

Of course, in the name of building mystery and intrigue, the trailer engages in some straight up falsehoods. I can testify that any important info established in the first five minutes of The Manchurian Candidate is reiterated and clarified as the movie goes along – if you miss those first five minutes, you’ll still be able to follow the story just fine.

But there’s a good reason that’s there. You see, The Manchurian Candidate came out just a couple years after Psycho, a film that radically changed the theater going experience.

Before Psycho, the common practice was for theaters to show movies (with their accompanying B-pictures, newsreels and animated shorts) on a continuous loop that would play throughout the day, with audience members coming in whenever they felt like and staying till they reached the point in the film they’d come in on. But Psycho‘s director (Alfred Hitchcock, you may have heard of ’em) wanted to preserve the impact of the film’s shocking twists. So they not only engineered a marketing campaign devoid of anything resembling a spoiler, but convinced movie theaters to institute a new policy: Psycho would be shown with a scheduled start time (a novel practice back then), and no one would be allowed into the theater after the movie began. If you wanted to see Psycho, you’d have to see it from the beginning, with all its twists and turns in the order the director intended.

This was a smash success, and was the instigator both for how theaters schedule movies today and for our modern, spoilerphobic film culture. So The Manchurian Candidate drenching itself in mystery and telling people they’d better not dare come in five minutes late: they were riding the coattails of giants there.