Posterwire.com is a movie poster weblog. From images of the latest Hollywood one-sheets to vintage movie posters, this film poster weblog hopes to offer a bit of insight into film key art.
More than many other film genres, horror film marketing campaigns have embraced the internet as a way to reach a target audience. Since many horror films are comparatively low budget, online advertising remains a cost effective way to reach horror fans. One of the latest genre films to take to the web is Silent Hill, based on the survival horror video game series of the same name. Coming on the heels of their recent “design” a Silent Hill movie poster contest, Sony Pictures has released a new set of character teaser posters.
The Silent Hill Character teaser posters present various characters from the film — a rogues gallery featuring “The Miners”, “The Red Pyramid”, “The Nurses”, “The Gray Child”, “Dahlia”, and “The Janitor”. Each character also gets their own set of desktop wallpapers, PSP wallpaper, and of all things, iPod skins. The teaser posters have a familiar “Seven” sepia color palette, but the creepiness of the characters still comes across well.
The film follows a mother’s search for her sick daughter in a haunted town. Silent Hill is the latest of the much-derided “video game to screen” adaptations — a trend that seems to see little success with audiences. Regardless of the fan-boy reaction, Hollywood will continue to make films from video game properties, as the billion dollar video game industry is just too big to ignore.
What better way to end our Halloween themed week of horror movie posters than with the one-sheet from John Carpentar’s classic film Halloween? The king of “slasher movies” was shot in just 21 days in 1978. Made on a budget of $300,000, it became the highest-grossing independent movie ever made at that time.
The knife wielding pumpkin Halloween movie poster was created by artist Bob Gleason. The Gleason illustration features a subtle shift from the skin of the orange pumpkin to that of the killer’s hand — each band of the pumpkin’s face is also shaped like a knife. The repeating knife pattern is an effective counter to the image of a decorated jack-o-lantern. This pumpkin head stand-in for killer Michael Meyers is also another example of the “unseen killer” design problem we mentioned previously. Gleason went on to design the “skull pumpkin” image for the Halloween II one-sheet, and the “screaming mask” for the Halloween III: Season of the Witch poster.
If the horror movie Halloween provided the scares, Friday the 13th the gore, then A Nightmare on Elm Street would bring a touch of dark humor. The Elm Street film series featuring the “dream killer” Freddy Krueger would also handily put a film studio on the map. That’s why New Line Cinema is known as “The House that Freddy Built”. While not as apparent in the first film by Wes Craven, killer Freddy Krueger would rely on his “dark wit” in later sequels.
The Nightmare on Elm Street movie poster features Freddy’s bladed glove fingers hovering over the bed of star Heather Langenkamp. The crisp and striking style of the illustration is reminiscent of legendary movie poster artist Bob Peak. This should come as no surprise since the Elm Street one-sheet was illustrated by his son, Matthew Joesph Peak. While the stylized skull face illustration bears little resemblance to Freddy Krueger himself, it is nonetheless creepy. Artist Matthew Peak went on to illustrate other posters in the Elm Street film series.
If the movie Halloween ushered in the modern slasher horror film, the original Friday the 13th helped solidify the “horror boom” of the late 1970s and early 80s. (And also set the standard for a bit more gore than John Carpenter’s Halloween offered.)
To celebrate the long running horror series and it’s 25th anniversary, a new book about the Friday the 13th film series has been released: Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th. “Fully illustrated with over 500 never-before-seen photos, rare archival documents and production materials, this is the ultimate oral and visual memoir of the most successful horror franchise in the history of motion pictures.”
The original Friday the 13th movie poster depicts the unknown “mystery killer” by placing an illustration of a scene in the woods within the silhouette of the slasher. (This also illustrates a basic design challenge for many horror film posters: How do you depict an unseen or somewhat abstracted image of a movie monster/killer/villian/etc. that you cannot reveal the identity of?) The one-sheet’s camp scene is surprisingly busy for a “scene within the poster” depiction — the trees and leaves take on a “television static” quality — a blue tint and other-worldly glow around the killer’s body gives it almost a science fiction feel. The disparity of these traits should make the poster less effective, but the image still works; perhaps it helps that they emphasized the killer’s knife in hand by dripping blood onto the film title logo.
Forget about the horror team-up of Freddy vs Jason. The idea of exploiting a staple of famous characters by doing cross-over appearances has been around for a long time (yes, even before they started doing it in comic books).
The 1948 comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein actually features three legendary movie monsters from the Universal Pictures roster — Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, and The Wolf Man. Universal had recycled their horror characters in countless movies, this being the final film to feature all three together.
This Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein poster is actually what is known as a movie poster insert. An insert is a 14″ and 36″ poster printed on card stock that was popular in the early days of film exhibition. (The insert size/format was discontinued in the mid 1980s — it remains as one of the most popular categories in movie poster collecting.) For our money, the painted faces of “Bud and Lou” look far more scary on this insert poster than the three monsters. (And some people think retouching is a modern invention.)
In honor of the upcoming Halloween holiday, it seems appropriate to post a few horror film posters this week. Our first horror one-sheet is what we like to consider The Scariest Movie Poster Ever.
The 1974 film Abby is the story of a female marriage counselor who marries and becomes possessed by an evil spirit — the Demon of Sexuality. The film, by exploitation producer Samuel Z. Arkoff and director Willam Gridler, was reportedly to be titled The Blackorcist. (Not surprisingly, the film was the subject of a lawsuit by the film studio Warner Bros. as being a rip-off of The Exorcist.)
As for the Abby movie poster itself, when you mix such a strange and scary image of actress Carol Speed with a few great low budget genres (Blaxplotation and Horror), it’s hard not to take notice. (This movie poster is also yet another example of the “Big Heads Floating in the Sky” movie poster layout cliche. Or in this case, a “Big Head Possessed by a Demon Floating in the Sky on Fire” film poster layout.)
As some of you may know, there is nothing we love more than discussing hidden imagery in movie poster one-sheets. It’s like Hollywood’s version of a hidden 3D poster you saw at the mall as a kid: stare at it long enough, and you are bound to find something. An impressive variation on this “hidden gem” idea is when the extra discovery actually contributes to the design of the poster itself. This idea brings us to the U.S. domestic one-sheet for the Oscar winning film Silence of the Lambs.
When a designer hides or adds a less than overt element to a composition it is sometimes called a secondary image or second read. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the hidden arrow in the FedEx logo. You’ve looked at something countless times only to discover something new (or like most of us, have it pointed out to you). In the Silence of the Lambs movie poster, Jodie Foster’s face is given a high contrast treatment with a large moth placed over her mouth. Looking closer at the moth, we notice a subtle skull on the head of the butterfly — the so-called “death’s head” moth from the film. A striking image, which matches the dark tone of the film itself.
In the Silence of the Lambs image, the ambiguous skull on the moth is actually made up of seven naked female bodies. The image of the “skull orgy” originated in a portrait photograph by Philippe Halsman of Salvador Dali, entitled Salvador Dali In Voluptate Mors. (The photo itself was inspired by surrealist Dali’s gouache Female Bodies as a Skull painting. Dali later translated the same idea into his own live sculptures.) The Lambs one-sheet was created by the (now defunct) film ad agency Dazu, and the skull image idea was reportedly given to the agency by director Jonathan Demme specifically for use in the film’s poster artwork.
