“It’s what I call the old-comfortable-shoe phenomenon,” says Jonathan McHugh, a music supervisor, director and founding member of the Guild of Music Supervisors. “You give people something familiar, like Destiny Child’s ‘Say My Name’ in the new ‘Candyman,’ and all of a sudden they’re more engaged in the content and predisposed to enjoy what they’re watching because they love the song.” Says Brian Monaco, president and global chief marketing officer at Sony Music Publishing: “It’s called ‘trailerizing’ a song. That means changing every aspect of the song but leaving the lyrics. People know the lyrics. The goal is to catch people’s attention. Maybe they’re not paying as much attention to the trailer, and they start to hear the chorus of the song, and they go, ‘Wait, I know this song.’ They start paying attention, and now they’re watching the trailer.” At Sony and in his four-times-a-year writing camps, Monaco has teams of writers working on reimagined versions of legendary artists’ catalogs. He has entirely reworked ELO’s discography, has redone a large portion of the Beatles’ songs and now is tackling Paul Simon’s newly acquired hefty songbook.

The ’80s that Kelly remembered wasn’t bright or fun. It was teenage kids getting into dumb arguments over the sex habits of the Smurfs. It was authorities falling for the shallow charm of a motivational speaker — ’80s icon Patrick Swayze, still beautiful. In 2000, there wasn’t a lot of cool-kid cachet in Echo & The Bunnymen or Tears For Fears or Duran Duran. They weren’t influences that bands mentioned in interviews, and they hadn’t yet become parts of a lucrative nostalgia circuit. They were just songs that sometimes got played on alt-rock stations’ flashback-brunch shows. Only Duran Duran’s “Notorious” was fresh in the cultural memory, and that was just because of a posthumous Biggie single. Kelly made them fresh. Later, in a director’s-cut DVD, Kelly swapped out “The Killing Moon” for INXS’ “Never Tear Us Apart” and made it even more tingly. Richard Kelly built beautiful little fantasias around those songs, and those scenes hit like a drug. The songs were key to the cult of Donnie Darko. Eventually, one of those songs even became a strange new kind of hit. The film ended with a montage of its characters pondering the imponderable, and Michael Andrews, composer of the film’s plinky-piano score, set that montage to a new version of “Mad World,” the Tears For Fears song from 1982. Andrews’ friend Gary Jules sang the angelic vocal, and Jules and Andrews replaced the drum-machine boom of the original song with shivery pianos and cellos, turning it into an eerie meditation. As Donnie Darko slowly became a word-of-mouth cult hit, Jules and Andrews released their version of “Mad World” as a single. Michel Gondry directed a dreamlike video. In the UK, the “Mad World” cover exploded. Nearly three years after Donnie Darko had its Sundance premiere, the “Mad World” cover had become an out-of-nowhere smash, earning the coveted position of Christmas #1. All the movie trailers set to moody orchestral versions of pop songs are a direct result of “Mad World” doing what it did.