A good trailer is a work of art. You’ve got to give the audience enough to get them hyped for the movie without giving away everything that makes it worth watching. No one wants to have the best bits of a movie ruined by an overzealous marketing team – Marvel, we’re looking at you. The best trailers aren’t just a tool to market a movie but can be entertaining in their own right. The best trailers are worth watching even if you never see the movie they’re promoting.

The Exorcist

Most trailers try to recut all the best bits of a movie into a handy primer for the movie, but The Exorcist is instead perfectly happy to just throw a handful of weird at you and hope it sticks. The opening few seconds give you enough plot to tell you what the movie is about before descending into a collection of flashing images. It is as creepy as the rest of the movie but still leaves plenty to the imagination, which just leaves us wanting more.

Alien

We didn’t go so far as to rank the trailers in this list, but, if we did, Alien would be number one. The trailer has absolutely no plot details. There is only the most fleeting of glimpses of the titular alien. It barely even has any action and has no dialogue, and yet it feels every bit as tense and uncomfortable as the movie it is promoting. This trailer feels like an arthouse film in itself. You don’t know why, but it feels like the trailer is hiding something important from you.

Superman: The Movie

Look, there are some bits of this trailer that don’t work for us. The focus on Marlon Brando as Jor-El rather than Christopher Reeve as Kal-El is a product of Brando’s larger star power in 1978, but there is no denying that the trailer for Superman: The Movie has a firm and unapologetic focus on hope. It shows off the effects that would go on to wow audiences when the movie came out. It sets a tone for the movie that, thankfully, the final product would deliver on.

Cloverfield

This is a case of the trailer for the movie being much better than the movie itself. Cloverfield is one of the biggest examples of the found footage genre of horror, but, if we’re being honest (and we always are), the trailer does everything the movie does but better because it is shorter. The trailer for Cloverfield is like a distilled, concentrated version of the film, giving you everything that the movie had to over with none of the excess fluff. It is a great trailer for a mediocre movie, which is somehow more impressive in our eyes.

Friendship

There is a tendency to lean on classic trailers for these sorts of lists, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t celebrate new ones as well. Friendship is a trailer of two halves. You get the feel-good buddy movie vibes from the first half and the psycho-horror vibes from the second. The two things are perfectly balanced in this trailer and it creates a sensation of extreme discomfort and tension as you watch it. This is a great trailer for the modern age.

Logan

At the time, we thought this would be the last time we saw Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, which gives this trailer an extra layer of sadness. The use of Johnny Cash’s Hurt. The emphasis on Logan’s shaking hands. The anticipatory sense of dread and fear hanging over every shot. The trailer for Logan tells you that the movie is going to give you psychic damage without actually telling you how bad that damage would be.

The Social Network

Biopics usually spend all their time trying to big up their subject, making them into a larger-than-life figure worthy of admiration. The trailer for The Social Network, however, shows you clips of the movie set to a haunting rendition of Creep, a power move that tells you that this will not paint Mark Zuckerberg in a positive light. We love this trailer more than we love the movie itself.

Popverse's top stories

• More people tuned into the Stranger Things season 5 release date announcement than the Stranger Things season 4 debut on Netflix
• MEMBERS ONLY: What do Aggretsuko and Chainsaw Man have in common? They're both about how much capitalism sucks [Popverse Jump]
• I have a hunch why Mike Flanagan worked so much Back to the Future into The Life of Chuck