Movie Trailer: Ethos, Pathos, & Logos

The trailer for the movie Prisoners effectively uses ethos, pathos, and logos to appeal to its potential audience. It uses ethos by demonstrating brief vignettes of family life to help establish the character of the main characters in the movie, as well as showing the police officer, and the suspect in the abduction. It uses logos to demonstrate that the father's conclusion that the girls were taken by the driver of the recreational vehicle have a basis in logic. It uses pathos by revealing that a child has been taken; few things are rifer with emotion than the idea of an abducted child. All three devices are traditionally used, in various degrees, by filmmakers hoping to establish an interested audience for their movies through trailers. By using all three rhetorical devices, the filmmaker creates a broad-based appeal, demonstrating that the film should be interesting...
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