Movie poster

Before creating my poster, i found it was important to look at other posters from the horror genre and narrow this down to Gothic horror to see what is effective in conveying the genre well and what to avoid. For example, did I want to make a cheesy, cliché cover following typical tropes or do something modern and unique?

The first step is to look at top designs for horror posters of all genres so to do this I looked at a few differetn websites each with their own top 10,50 or 100.

These are a few that appeared on the lists several time. On first glance there are not a lot of similarities between the posters but all of these posters have one main image, none of which show any human faces leaving some ambiguity to the plot suggesting the director does not want the audience to be attached to a specific character. There is also minimal writing on the posters, just a title and a small quote, really letting the image create the impact on the audience. As expected there is a similar colour scheme between all of the posters - black, red and white but unexpectedly, blue is used, especially in the older movies.The blue is used as a contrast much like the light and dark possibly showing hope and a positive ending.

Gothic posters

As our genre is Gothic it makes sense to look at some famous Gothic films and their posters

In comparison, the Gothic posters have very little similarities with the horror posters. The newer, more modern poster such as The Woman in Black, Crimson Peak and Bram Stokers Dracula are much more like my idea of what a Gothic poster should look like compared to the bright and colourful and drawn posters of the Hammer Horror generation. This is most definitely related to the improvement of technology. Editing can be done using software to add blurs and layer images and filter but this could not be done up until fairly recently.


For my movie poster I wanted to combine the succesful aspects of horror posters with an underlying modern gothic theme.

I have three different drafts made from using screenshots from the film.

My first poster is definitely more like a horror poster than a Gothic horror with inspiration taken from poltergeist. It is fairly minimalistic, using one central image and a black and white colour scheme. If think this one is very effective as it doesn't reveal much about the film but shows that it is a horror movie, however it does not convey 'Gothic' like the other two posters. Posters 1 and 2 are the same photograph that shows the main character and reveals a little bit more than the first in terms of genre, characters and story but is less effective in connoting fear and suspense. 

I definitely prefer the first poster as it conveys typical tropes of the horror genre through use of the blur on the hands, connoting ghosts and subsequently suspense. It also doesn't reveal too much about the plot, leaving it open to audience interpretation just like the film.