Horror Movie Posters

Conventions

Movie Title – both to attract and inform the audience. Placed at the bottom in the same colour as the girls face as your eyes naturally travel down a picture, so this is memorable.

Tagline – Something alluding to the narrative to interest the audience and encourage them to see it placed above the title to attract the audience’s eye.

Central Image – The central image takes up the whole of the poster, as it is the main attraction for the audience, rather than leaving space for an included background image as the disturbing simplicity of the poster is it’s attraction.

Institutions/Info Dates included as an informative to the audience. Could be aimed at film fanatics who will purposefully go to see a film produced by a specific company, placed at the bottom as this may be the least important information.

More information on institutions – Stating other successful films the institution have made has been placed at the top to attract fans of this genre as it is one of the first things they will read as their eyes travel down.

Horror Movie Posters Changing Over Time

Movie posters through the early 1900’s tended to be in the conventional format that we still see on horror movie poster’s today with the central image, some kind of background image and the title placing etc. However as shown in the two posters above, they quite often displayed quite bright and lurid colours, which is not something generally seen in modern horror posters.

Coming up to the late 1900’s and into the millennium, horror movie posters began to take more of a similar format to what we see today with the darker more bleak colourings and the conventionally set tagline, then central image, followed by title and finally institutions at the very bottom of the poster.