Brief B&W Super 8 Clip Recalls Lost’s Dharma Initiative

With producer Steven Spielberg and director JJ Abrams’ film Super 8 arriving in theaters on June 10, the marketing campaign is clearly playing to the previously established strengths of both filmmakers.

Consider: the Super 8 sequence with the pickup truck racing towards the railway tracks is highly reminiscent of Roy Neary on at the railway crossing in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Moreover, the film is set in the era of Spielberg’s defining films (1970s) and tells the story from the perspective of childlike wonder.

Add to that JJ Abrams’ contemporary gift for slowly building mystery and suspense (i.e. Cloverfield) and you have an interesting meld of two styles that should play well together.

The most recent example of the Abrams’ influence can be seen in a new two second clip that arrived at the LA Times recently, which you can watch using the player below. As writer Geoff Boucher describes it, it’s all part of the viral mosaic designed to heighten suspense for the coming film — in this most recent example — using the same technique that worked so well on Lost with old footage of the Dharma Initiative (for those of you who watched the series).

Not long ago, a parcel arrived at the Los Angeles Times newsroom and inside was a tiny snippet of film on a Super 8 reel … The snippet is a bit maddening (why couldn’t it be longer?), but then this is just a piece in the big viral-marketing puzzle; fans on the trail are watching the grainy government-file film being pieced together over at the “Super 8″ editing-room website. The portion we got in the mail shows a man in a lab coat who might be Dr. Woodward, the character who is so very close to the central mystery in the sci-fi script by Abrams.

Check out the clip below and then head on over to the link above to see if you can begin assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that presumably offers insights into the otherworldly entity at the heart of Super 8‘s story.

Meanwhile, in addition to Spielberg, what other motion picture antecedents influenced Abrams’ genesis of Super 8, that might offer clues about the tone and direction of the film? According to the filmmaker himself, The Thing, Alien, Slumber Party Massacre (nope, no kidding), Scanners, and, of course E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial.