9 Dystopian Book Trailers Worth Watching Before the World Ends

Dystopian book trailers carry a heavier load than most. Every dystopia runs on a rule: the state decides who lives, who works, who remembers, who disappears. A novel has three hundred pages to teach that rule. A trailer has about a minute, and in that minute it must also show someone breaking it.

Here are nine from the Film 14 library, and they cover the map: a surviving Aztec empire, a drowned world, a girl exiled to 1959, a boy whose blood will not clot. Some we shot on location with a cast. Others we built from licensed footage or animation. Every one had to sell a world before it could sell a book.

The trailers

1. Alexander’s Run by Tony Phillips

The 23rd century. A cataclysm has ravaged the Earth, and the government has ordered the execution of the sick. Alexander is a hemophiliac boy. The verdict on children like him arrives on a black title card in five words: they are to be killed. So he runs.

We filmed on location in Argentina, and the trailer runs two and a half minutes, long for the form, because this world needed room. It opens on an empty ocean, then moves in close: a transfusion line taped to an arm, a bare examination room, a shelf of body bags. The chase follows through pine forest and dead woods at night, under torchlight. The landscape supplies the scale. The hospital supplies the dread. It made our list of the best book trailers of 2022, and it still plays like a short film.

2. Western Lights by C.P. Schaefer

Summer, 2028. Earth’s magnetic poles are flipping, super auroras light the sky, and the climate is collapsing faster than anyone predicted. Researcher Sara Gathers falls through a portal the lights have opened and wakes in the late 1980s, with a few decades to stop a catastrophe nobody else believes is coming.

This one is a book teaser, built from licensed footage rather than a shoot, and it shows how much a teaser can carry. It starts in orbit, with the edge of the planet catching the sun, then drops to wildfire and cracked earth, then to a lone figure on a ridge under the words “a portal through time.” The order is the story: first tomorrow burns, then the past opens.

3. The History Makers by Val Bodurtha

Spain never conquered the Aztecs. Five hundred years later, Azteca has smartphones, parties, and a priesthood that still insists the sun will not rise without human sacrifice. On her seventeenth birthday, Myla learns the priests have been lying, and a band of rebels asks her to help bring the whole order down. Bodurtha started the book as a high school history assignment and wrote it the summer before college.

One image carries the premise. A stepped pyramid stands between glass towers and construction cranes, the sun balanced on its peak. Then the same skyline appears in a pair of aviator sunglasses, and we are looking at the girl who has to live under it. The first shot builds the world. The second puts a person inside it. That is the whole job of a dystopian trailer, done in two shots.

4. The Last Voyage of Poe Blythe by Ally Condie

Ally Condie wrote Matched, one of the books that defined YA dystopia. Here, seventeen-year-old Poe Blythe captains the Gilded Lily, a ship that dredges gold from the river for the Outpost. Two years ago, raiders killed Call, the boy she loved, and Poe wants the river cleared of them. The Outpost has secrets of its own.

We shot it cold, gray, and patient, like the river. The trailer holds on Poe’s face in extreme close-up, drops to flecks of gold among the river stones, and ends on a hand-drawn map of the river as red seeps across it. A girl, the gold, the route. Three images, and you know what the voyage will cost.

5. Our Young Guardians: Seven & Two by Rodi Szoke

Strictly speaking, this one is a fantasy. But its premise sits at the root of the dystopian shelf: a world that hands its war to children. Szoke’s young heroes leave their families to join an ancient quest against a dark army.

We shot it in open country, and the trailer never shows the war. A small hand brushes through tall grass. Something masked waits in the dark. A boy with a dirt-streaked face looks straight ahead at whatever is coming. Holding back the battle makes it worse. You watch the children and count what they are about to lose.

6. Monument 14: Savage Drift by Emmy Laybourne

The third Monument 14 novel. After a chemical disaster, the survivors have reached a refugee camp in Canada. Then Niko learns that Josie is alive, held in a containment camp in Missouri with others exposed to the compounds, and he sets out to bring her home.

No explosions, no crowds. The trailer opens on a sky streaked with fire, then settles on a girl alone on a loading dock, unfolding a torn note. The rest plays out through a chain-link fence. A fence is ordinary, cheap, and absolute, which is why it works better here than an army would. The best dystopias look like somewhere you have already been.

7. The Vanishing Deep by Astrid Scholte

The seas have risen and swallowed most of the world. Seventeen-year-old Tempe dives the drowned ruins for anything she can trade, saving to have her dead sister, Elysea, revived at Palindromena, an island facility that brings back the dead for twenty-four hours and then returns them.

Sixteen seconds, all underwater. A girl drifts through green water with her hair floating loose while three lines of type tell the story: two sisters, one dangerous secret, twenty-four hours to uncover the truth. A dystopia needs no skyline. It needs one rule and a clock, and the water supplies the rest.

8. Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates

America, 2039. Seventeen-year-old Adriane Strohl gives a graduation speech the state calls treason. Her sentence is exile in time: she is sent back to 1959, to a college in Wisconsin, for re-education. It is a dystopia hiding inside a period piece.

Eighteen seconds of animation. A woman’s profile smears and tears apart, as if time itself were pulling at her, under a single question: what if you had to live in the past to atone for your sins in the future? One line of copy does the work of a jacket blurb, and the image does the rest.

9. Terraformer by Colleen Houck

Colleen Houck, the bestselling author of the Tiger’s Curse series, sends a colony mission to the planet Crillain IV. Botanist trainee Astra Meador wakes from hypersleep too early. Her father died in transit, her mother never boarded, and something on the new world has started speaking inside her head.

An animated trailer, ninety seconds long. Animation lets a trailer go where a camera cannot afford to: through hypersleep, across a nebula, onto a planet with a mind of its own. For science fiction on this scale, it is often the smartest choice on the table.

What the best dystopian book trailers get right

Line these up and a pattern shows.

They state the rule early. “They are to be killed.” “What if you had to live in the past to atone for your sins in the future?” A dystopia is a system, and the viewer has to understand the system before they can fear it.

They stay close to a face. Poe’s eyes. Myla’s sunglasses. A girl on a loading dock. The world is the premise, but a person is the hook.

They make the familiar strange. A pyramid among skyscrapers. A chain-link fence. A hospital room. The most frightening futures look like the present, slightly bent.

They fit the form to the book. Alexander’s Run needed a location shoot and two and a half minutes. The Vanishing Deep needed sixteen seconds and a single image. Terraformer needed animation. Knowing which one your book needs is most of the work. Our trailer packages cover full productions with cast and crew, and our book teasers deliver a world in fifteen to sixty seconds for a fraction of the cost. You can watch the rest of our trailers here.

Want more? Our scariest book trailers list shares a few titles with this one, and 10 YA book trailers that belong in movie theaters picks up where this list leaves off.