Horror movies are a dime a dozen these days, but every now and then we get one that truly rattles us to our core. 2016 has already presented us with a string of solid horror outings -- from The Witch, to the recent Lights Out -- but the next one on the slate looks like it could easily be the scariest of the bunch. A new 360-degree trailer Fede Alvarez' Don't Breathe has just dropped online, and it's most certainly not for the faint of heart. Check it out below and try not to freak out too much.
Ladies and gentlemen, that's how you do a horror trailer properly. The preview seen above takes the horrific basement scene from Don't Breathe that we have already seen in other trailers, but makes it wholly interactive for audiences. Our first-person view moves slowly down a darkened hallway, but allows us to look around as Stephen "should really play Cable" Lang's hulking Blind Man stalks us. As we look around, he slowly pops out of the shadows to fire (literally) blindly and just generally induce nauseating amounts of terror.
As odd as it sounds, it appears that this particular trailer (and many elements of Don't Breathe's overall narrative) have taken ample inspiration from the world of video games. While many video game genres have ramped up the action in recent years, the survival-horror genre has gone in the opposite direction by making direct combat with the monster almost impossible. Games like Alien: Isolation and Outlast (to name a couple) give players access to cameras, and sensors to detect an incoming enemy, but they don't offer much in the way of actual fighting options. Don't Breathe seems to have taken this idea to heart and crafted a movie where the protagonists have to evade a bad guy to stay alive, rather than fight him.
The best horror films rely on the simplest premises, and Don't Breathe's overall premise is as simple as they come. A trio of youths in a small town are looking for a way out of their run-down neighborhood when they learn that a local blind man has a safe full of cash in his home. Thinking it's an easy score, they break into his house to find that he's far more capable, and far more deadly, than they ever could have imagined.
If Fede Alvarez' Don't Breathe manages to come close to the terror induced by this one trailer, then we will consider the movie a rousing success. Don't Breathe looks like one of the most terrifying horror films in recent memory, and we think it's just what we need to close out the summer of 2016. Don't Breathe will hit theaters on August 26; do you have the guts to see it?
