By Joshua De Meyer

The lighting of a Horror Poster is usually dark, giving the poster an eerie and uncertain feel. The dark lighting can denote fear. anxiety, uncertainty and mystery. Dark lighting can also prevent giving anything away about a film, making the films story more mysterious and can make an audience interested and curious about seeing a horror film advertised in the film.

The use of dark lighting and having the poster in black and white makes it look mysterious and gives the audience the idea that perhaps the film is set in the past.

Also making the subject in the poster cast in shadow makes the subject more mysterious and makes the audience wonder whether this individual is the horror.

I might use dark lighting for my horror poster, as I do like how it adds a sense of mystery and uncertainty to a Horror film poster.

Font is important at hinting the genre of a film when advertised through a Film poster, for a horror film poster, the font for the name of the film is usually informal and can be large and distorted, usually this has a negative effect on the audience and can make the audience feel perhaps intimidated and can give an eerie feel to a horror film poster.

These fonts used for ‘Saw’ and ‘Into the Dark World’, look distorted and irregular and are both very informal fonts, this makes the posters seem like something that isn’t considered as normal and can have paranormal, out of the ordinary elements. They’re both relatively bold fonts, making them eye catching to the audience. I would use for my film poster a distorted and informal font so to make my poster seem eerie and creepy.

Colours such as red, black and white all have very horrific connotations. Red has connotations of blood and gore, black has connotations of night, darkness, uncertainty, and white has ghostly, paranormal connotations. The colours of white and black are quite dull, and can perhaps symbolise the uncertainty of an unseen horror within the film of the poster. The red can symbolise the horrific and gory aspects of a film advertised through a horror film poster. Colours like black, white and red can make the audience feel intimidated, worried, horrified, uncertain and perhaps mystified as to what the film could be about and therefore this draws them into the poster and makes them want to go and see the film.

The colours in both ‘30 Days of Night’ and ‘One Missed Call’ consist of red, black and white colours. The use of black in both suggests that black is a common colour to use in a horror film poster, and it is this element that I’ll use in my horror film poster because it would make my poster, to an audience, more believable that the genre of the poster is horror.

Usually in a horror movie poster, the image usually depicts a dark mysterious figure, a woman, a young girl or the antagonist of the film. This allows the audience an insight to who or what the horror in the film is, or hint to as what the horror is. Some horror posters can also depict torture or disfigurement of figures, and this usually can terrify and/or intimidate the audience/ Some horror posters use dark figures to create an uncertain and eerie feeling to the poster and some horror posters actually depict the antagonist to scare and/or intimidate the audience. Most shots of the horror depicted on the poster are usually close ups, and this makes the audience more frightened and intimidated by the poster. Here are a few examples of Horror Movie posters that either use a mysterious figure or close ups of the antagonist of the film.