Nothing gets me off more than a well-crafted movie poster. Part art, part marketing, the movie poster has interested me for years and remains (to this day) one of my favorite art mediums. Besides family photos, it’s movie posters that grace my walls at home. If a single poster can excite and interest people to go out and see the film, then they’ve done their job. But if it can be appreciated as stand-alone art, then it’s really accomplished something special. So when a poster is thrown together with the skills of an 8-year-old kid on Photoshop, it angers me. How f*ckin’ lazy can you be when throwing the faces of the film’s stars on black background and calling it a poster? Hella lazy. And unfortunately, as of late, most posters are on this side of being lazy and goddmanit, it needs to stop.
Let’s take a look at some successful flicks we’ve seen this year in the horror genre. There’s PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2, an image from a shitty VHS transfer with boring text and a plain black background. Inspired? Interesting? Hardly. Try snooze-inducing. And big surprise, it’s also a complete rip-off of the lame-ass poster for PARANORMAL ACTIVITY. Funny how that works, huh? Then there’s SAW 3D. Really? A giant building-like Jigsaw with the innards of a machine? What the hell is going on here? I’ll give it props for being more interesting than P.A. 2, but in terms of a poster—especially when looking at the rest of the SAW series—SAW 3D’s poster is pretty damn weak.
But let’s look a little closer at some more recent shit like RED STATE, for example, which just released two new ‘teaser’ posters, one of which sorta works with a nun and a giant cross titled ‘Fear God’, but the other—simply titled ‘The Virgin’ with some chick looking all virginal… what the hell does this have to do with anything? How does ‘The Virgin’ and ‘Fear God’ have anything to do with each other? It’s not even like they’re using the same type of language or contrasty imagery there. The biggest question I had after looking at ‘The Virigin’ poster was who the hell is this chick and why does she get her own poster? Not what’s this movie about and when can I see it? And it’s coming from writer/director Kevin Smith, too. Sad… just sad.
Maybe we’re to blame for the lack of originality and the all-out blandness of recent movie posters… or maybe we can simply blame the MPAA for being a group of pansy-ass jerkweeds who somehow sit on a moral high horse determining what is—and isn’t—OK for the people of America to look at. Case in point, the recent poster for BEREAVEMENT, featuring a dad and his little boy holding hands… and a giant knife. Not that it’s the most interesting poster in the world, but it sort of invokes some sense of wanting to know more about the flick itself and it’s different from the usual headshots we’re normally bombarded with. So what does the MPAA think of BEREAVEMENT? They hate it. A kid holding a knife is NOT ok, apparently; therefore, they’ve straight banned the poster altogether. Seriously? For what? I’ve seen racier stuff on Saturday morning cartoons than this—and THIS gets banned? No wonder most horror flicks play it safe when it comes to their poster art—they do it out of fear of being banned!
Maybe it’s the booze talkin’, but I think it’s about time for resurgence in awesome movie posters for the upcoming horror flicks hitting the big screen. Give us more GRINDHOUSE-style posters and less SCREAM-like or SAW-like or RED STATE-like posters from here on out. I want to be in the lobbey of a theater and see a poster that not only scares the bejesus out of me (or shock me in its sheer awesomeness), but it also makes me want to hang it in my living room above the mantel, and (maybe most of all) makes me want to actually throw down my hard earned cash and see the flick it’s pimping out in the theater. If Hollywood starts to follow the lead of posters like GRINDHOUSE and less like the posters for SEASON OF THE WITCH (giant heads don’t sell movies), then we’ll all be the better—and the happier—for it.