5 Rock Songs That Took These Movie Trailers To A Whole New Level

Movie trailers are an art form all their own, a tight blend of audio and visual editing that can live or die based on the ingredients, and one of the most critical is the soundtrack. The song or piece of orchestration underneath a trailer's action sets its tone, establishes its pace, and has the power to elevate the clip to instant virality. Naturally, rock music has been the key to many of these super trailers. There's something universally epic about combining distorted guitar and cinematic action, and the effect is even more intense when paired with the signature lightning-speed editing of modern trailers.

Below are some of the best examples of rock songs taking their trailers to a whole new level. Some accomplish this via straightforward synergy, stacking an energetic song atop an energetic visual feast. Others pull their tunes back through orchestration and minimalist covers, turning them into understatements that contrast, and therefore highlight, the action. Others still just inject a laugh, and that can be plenty.

Anyone who has read any of Stieg Larsson's "Millennium" books knows that they bubble over with a specific tone — a sharp, crackling sinisterness that is as much a character as the protagonists themselves. Successfully capturing that tone for the movie's trailer would have been a major asset in attracting the books' audience into theaters, and fortunately, the first teaser for the first film, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," pulls it off with aplomb. Leading the sonic charge is a pulsating, jagged cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song," with vocals by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It's understandable to yearn for the original Zeppelin version at first, but within the trailer's first minute, the cover version is sure to win back even the staunchest diehard. The cover's pumping bass and industrial-sounding drums are not only suitable replacements for the original but also hit the manic, menacing tone better than the original ever could.

A major force behind that industrial feel is producer and rock god Trent Reznor. At one point, he was known best as the frontman for Nine Inch Nails, but these days he's just as lauded for his multi-award-winning career in scoring films like "The Social Network," "Gone Girl," and Disney-Pixar's "Soul." Reznor's influence on the "Immigrant Song" is palpable, and it's precisely that touch, with its distortion overload and anxious pace, that makes "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" such a standout trailer.

With every new iteration of Batman to hit the big screen, it becomes harder and harder to set the new version apart from its many predecessors. For anyone 34 or older, for example, Robert Pattinson is the sixth different actor in their lifetime to play a live-action Batman, and that isn't even counting television versions. One of the ways Pattinson's Batman — or more accurately, writer-director Matt Reeves' Batman — distinguishes itself from the pack is its grave, brooding atmosphere, and it lends this feature to its trailer via Nirvana's "Something in the Way."

"Something in the Way" was always one of Nirvana's darkest and most sullen tracks, and unlike the group's big, bombastic singles, it remains consistently subdued throughout. A faster, more aggressive track would seem to fit an action franchise like Batman, but Reeves decided to use something more muted. The song suits his decidedly more tragic Batman, and it was also a core decision he made early on in order to set the tone of the trailer and the movie itself.

As Reeves told Esquire: "Early on, when I was writing, I started listening to Nirvana, and there was something about 'Something in the Way,' which is in the first trailer, which is part of the voice of that character. ... He's like a Batman Kurt Cobain." The song provided both a uniquely dour color to the "Batman" trailer and helped create the same in the movie itself.

It takes a certain, rare level of fame for a trailer — not the movie, but merely the trailer — to become worthy of parody. The first official trailer for David Fincher's (and no less Aaron Sorkin's) "The Social Network" reached that level of fame, becoming parodied on the sitcom "Community" as part of a larger Fincher homage, and with good reason. The clip was a big media talking point, largely due to the haunting piano cover of Radiohead's "Creep" that paints the footage entirely, and it even spawned a slew of copycat trailers, all with their own spooky, downbeat "Creep" covers.

To the chagrin of Radiohead purists, Thom Yorke's original, emotive vocals are absent, and as hard as the iconic singer is to replace, the children's choir that took the gig is even more effective. "Creep" is an eerie song to begin with, and the soft falsettos of children only heighten the feeling of unease. Their voices, along with the song's tense chord progression, imbue all the trailer's business jargon-filled dialogue with an edge that no other song could. As a bonus, the song's lyrics sync with the footage eerily well at times, even up to the final, haunting line: "I don't belong here ..."

In adapting a children's book as beloved as "Where the Wild Things Are," director Spike Jonze and company had to try and capture magic. The book has been a childhood staple for generations, beloved for its idiosyncrasy and its unabashed celebration of the same. Needless to say, any adaptation would have to reproduce that sense of enchantment or necessarily fail. The film's first trailer does a remarkable job signaling that, yes, the magic that Maurice Sendak summoned when he first wrote the book is here again, and to do so, the trailer utilizes "Wake Up" by Arcade Fire to near-perfect effect.

The song's initial jangling chords and singer Win Butler's yelping vocals fit the twee, indie atmosphere of the trailer, but it's the song's expansive, chanting chorus that defines the climax. A movie like "Where the Wild Things Are," made to visualize the unlimited capacity of childhood dreams, thrives in the unknown and unsaid, and everything about the "Wake Up" chorus is unsaid. The lofty and cascading "woahs" that make up the chorus make the trailer feel ethereal and imagined, and the lack of lyrics leaves room for the audience's imagination, too. "Wake Up" is impish yet harmless, light and yet full of potential, just like the children and children at heart that "Where the Wild Things Are" sought to charm. You could say the song fits the trailer like Max fits his monsters.

Marvel's decision to adapt the D-list superhero team Guardians of the Galaxy was a major gamble from the start. Unlike mainstream characters like Spider-Man and the Hulk, a Guardians movie wouldn't come with a large base of diehard fans, and so adapting them meant giving them something unique for new audiences to latch onto. Essentially, a different kind of team required a different kind of marketing, and luckily, writer-director James Gunn brought with him just the right thing: The one-two punch of comedy and classic rock.

The crux of both of the movie's two main trailers is how unprepared, unenthused, and unconventional the Guardians are, and at the climax of that point, both slam into Blue Swede's cover of "Hooked on a Feeling." It might be the song's "ooga chakas" or the contrast between its blaring brass horns and the blasé behavior of the Guardians, but whatever the reason, "Hooked on a Feeling" plays especially comedically in the clips. A large portion of the marketing for Guardians, as well as the actual plot of the films, relies on nostalgia for those classic rock songs that scored audiences' youths, and "Hooked on a Feeling" was the Guardians movies' first example. If it weren't competing with the use of Redbone's "Come and Get Your Love" to open the first film, it would also be the best example.