Horror movies are scary, sure, but you know what’s even scarier? Horror movie trailers. Whether they catch you in a movie theater where there’s no escape (like so many learned to their chagrin when the trailer for Other Mommy scared the pants off of everyone going to see The Odyssey on opening weekend), or late at night on TV when you’re not expecting it, many horror movie trailers are designed for maximum fear factor.

These trailers scare us for many reasons. Some of them put in all the scariest moments from the movie (which can then be disappointing once you’re watching the movie and realize you already know all the jumps). Others use scary music or a voiceover to give us chills. Some wring the most fright from a totally contextless shot, made even scarier by the fact that we don’t know what’s going on or why it’s happening. Depending on your mileage, some of these trailers are even scarier than the films they’re advertising. That’s even more impressive when you take into account that they only have a minute or two with which to do so.

There’s an art to making a great trailer, and an even more specific art to making a great horror trailer. They have to capably advertise that this movie is going to be the scariest movie people have ever seen without spoiling the best parts, but they also have to be scary enough to freak out whoever’s watching and stick in their memory. The trailers in this list are more than memorable—they scared us so bad we lose sleep thinking about them even now.

It’s Alive (1974)

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READ MORE:The 10 Best Trailers of the Last 10 Years

Sometimes half a minute is all it takes to scare the pants off of us, and no movie trailer demonstrates this as effectively as the one for the 1974 Larry Cohen sci-fi horror movie It’s Alive. All that’s shown in the 25-second teaser is a baby carriage sitting in darkness, but that’s enough. “There’s only one thing wrong with the Davis baby,” intones the spooky voiceover as a clawed hand reaches around the edge of the carriage: “It’s alive.” Cue a sound that’s halfway between a baby’s cry and a demonic shriek. Probably the most terrifying part of the whole video is when the voiceover kicks in again at the end, begging the audience “Don’t see it alone. Please.” Something about the sincerely frightened tone of that last word makes our hair stand on end.

Alien (1979)

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There’s no dialogue in the trailer for Alien, which begins with a sneak peek at that iconic opening title sequence before rattling off a reel of some of the movie’s scariest shots. Scenes of Sigourney Weaver sprinting through the halls of the Nostromo are interspersed between footage of the crashed spaceship and the other characters looking horrified, backgrounded by a tense, pounding score featuring noises that sound like fast heartbeats and screams. You know, like the stuff your body’s going to be doing once you finally see the movie. Crucially, it doesn’t show any part of the alien itself, leaving that up to the viewer’s wildest nightmares.

The Shining (1980)

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The theatrical teaser for The Shining is one of the most iconic scary trailers ever made, even though it barely shows anything actually scary. It’s a masterclass in building tension and drumming up fear in your audience: spooky humming and dissonant clangs play over that one shot of the elevator doors as the names of the actors and director scroll up the screen. Who or what will come out of those doors? Jack Nicholson? A ghost? Stephen King himself? The answer, as we know, is much more frightening than any of those options: a river of dark red blood pouring from the inside of the elevator and pooling across the floor before dunking the camera lens. The shot was so difficult and stressful to prepare that even Kubrick was too anxious to watch it on the day it was filmed, so it’s no wonder they wanted to show it off in the trailer.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

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The trailer for The Blair Witch Project is scary on its own, but it was made even more frightening by a viral marketing campaign so successful that it half-convinced audiences that everything they were seeing in the movie actually happened for real. The trailer introduces Heather, Joshua, and Michael (who all went by their real names) before the text on the screen tells us that they all vanished while in search of a forest-haunting witch. The most chilling portion of the trailer is the footage of Heather admitting that this is all her fault before apologizing to her friends’ moms as well as her own. What happened to these people?? You’ll have to come see the movie to find out.

The Grudge (2004)

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It’s not difficult to cut a trailer together from a movie with scenes as scary as The Grudge, as this movie’s trailer undoubtedly proves. What’s scariest, apart from the footage of the ghostly Kayako and her equally creepy son, is the curse lore offered by the intertitles: “When someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage, a curse is left behind. It never forgives. It never forgets.” It coalesces into the form of a pale woman with frighteningly long hair who crawls the wrong way down the stairs and attacks you in the shower. Scary!!

Sinister (2012)

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There’s something uniquely chilling about the trailer for Sinister, and it’s in the way it presents its central villain. The movie is about a man who discovers what appears to be footage of murders hidden in the attic of his family’s new home, all connected by a demonic entity that feeds on children. The entity, the trailer explains, lives within images of itself and goes after whoever looks at them — and of course the next thing the trailer shows you is a bunch of images of the creature. Reminiscent of the way The Ring implicates the viewer in its curse, the trailer for Sinister draws you into the horror. It’s all fiction, sure, but something in the back of your mind wonders: now that I’ve seen this thing, is it going to come after me next??

The Witch (2015)

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Whether or not the actual movie delivers on its promise (still debated after all these years), the trailer for The Witch is absolutely terrifying. Dissonant plucked string instruments and sudden sound effects add a note of dread to the already frightening images of dark woods and children acting possessed, and the many quotes from early critic reviews promise a horror movie experience unlike any other. The scariest part is the fact that you only see the hag-like witch in bits and pieces — a foot coming out of a dark doorway, a naked figure crawling on the floor of a hut. Whatever else happens in this movie, you know these characters are probably doomed.

Lights Out (2016)

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Both Lights Out and the Weeping Angels of Doctor Who know that one of the scariest things a villainous entity can do is move really fast towards you when you can’t see it. The first scene in the trailer for Lights Out shows us the rules of its ghostly antagonist: in the dark, it appears as a silhouette of a woman that vanishes as soon as you turn the lights on. Unfortunately, if you flicker the lights on and off like a fool, it can move towards you very quickly and suddenly and get you before you have the chance to turn the lights on again and banish it. That first bit is so scary we can barely register what happens in the rest of the trailer.

Skinamarink (2023)

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Skinamarink is one of the best vibes-only horror movies of the decade, and its trailer manages to be incredibly scary without actually showing you anything all that frightening. It’s mostly just grainy shots of children alone in a dark house watching old-timey cartoons and whispering to each other, which is spooky enough in its own right. And then you have the scary voiceover repeating “IN THIS HOUSE,” letting you know that something awful is about to happen or perhaps already happening to these children, and there’s very little they can do about it. Like the movie itself, the trailer never actually shows you inherently frightening images of violence or scary looking creatures, instead relying on your own imagination to scare itself.

28 Years Later (2025)

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There’s some lore to the trailer for 28 Years Later, which puts its viewers through actual military survival stress test techniques to achieve its desired menacing effect. Mildly frightening footage from the movie — rage zombies running through a field, soldiers in pitch black shooting at unseen enemies — is set to Taylor Holmes’ 1915 spoken-word rendition of “Boots,” a Rudyard Kipling poem about army soldiers marching through the Second Boer War, the recording for which is used to psychologically batter soldiers going through U.S. military SERE training. The effect is immediate: An otherwise moody, spooky trailer is transformed into a truly terrifying experience that lingers long after the video stops.