Making Horror Novel Trailers

The whole world is obsessed by image rather than the word.

So to make a novel, I had to create a visual trailer. To get people into focusing on the words, I realized I had to trick them into it something more vivid first, capture their interest, then hope that I could trade that interest off to another manner of visual processing.

Creating captivating YouTube videos to promote my novel, "The Book of Blue Daggers," was an adventure that allowed me to explore the power of visuals and music. The novel’s moody, spooky and intense atmosphere, and my direct visual/imagist style of writing really lent itself towards visuals, so I thought I could translate it 1:1 fairly easily.

I asked a friend-of-a-friend, Christine B. to be in the videos. I had never met her before, never talked to her before. But, she had a looked that I liked, and a sharp personal style that would work wonders onscreen.

I knew I was dealing with some immediate constraints. Dialogue would be too steep a challenge, so it had to be all visual, likely with music. Getting a scene would require complex blocking and multiple people, so I wanted to go with a vibe, a feeling, more of a collection of small moments and the idea of Sophie’s character.

Working with those constraints, I just shot images and video that seemed to capture the mood that I was looking for. Ominous, intense, bold on the part of Christine, something that I knew that I could shape into something more meaningful when fully assembled in Canva.

Composing droning melodies and ambient sounds on the Deepmind 6 perfectly complemented the visuals. I wanted everything here to be organic, hand-made, so to speak, by myself, to capture that this was an art project by Brent Dragoo, rather than something inspired by images and music made by someone else.