Halloween movie poster

This is a poster of the 1978 horror ‘Halloween’ it was directed by John Carpenter. A brief synopsis is; the film follows the tale of Michael Myers an escaped psychiatric patient who goes on a rampage to kill Laurie Strode and some of her friends on Halloween eve. This is the same night he had murdered his sister at six years old, after eight years of treatment it is clear that Michael is pure evil, then once he escapes, his psychiatrist races against time to find him.

The ideology of the poster is to be creepy, scary, mysterious and eerie. The movie poster has a black background which has connotations with death and is a stereotypical convention of a horror movie .It also makes the title and tagline stand out as they are in white. The central image is of a knife, the point of the knife is emphasized with a change in colour tone, and the knife is a graphically enhanced image and is a weapon generally associated with the genre of horror, murder and death. Behind the knife a clear pumpkin shape is visible, it fades in at the edges at seems to be an extension of the picture of the knife, it seems to have an evil face on it. A pumpkin is always related to Halloween therefore refers back to the title of the film and the night Michaels killings began .

The title stretches across the whole top of the poster ,it is white and the font is quite basic and bold, and it does stand out against the black background. The tagline ‘The night he came home’ is referring to Michael returning to finish what he had started all those years ago. It is a persuasive tagline, with the ‘he’ highlighted by the use of italics and a larger font. The intended audience for the poster seems to be fifteen plus, because it is clear that it is a horror genre, because it has a few of the stereotypical codes and conventions such as a knife and the use of the colour black.

The poster however doesn’t have any critic comments or references, which is generally common in movie posters. There is also no images of the actresses and actors staring in the movie on the poster in this case Jamie Lee Curtis is the star, these are normally inserted photographically.This poster was created around the period of release in 1978, so it isn’t as technical and doesn’t use as many special effects as a poster would the present day. Therefore it is clearly representing the era.

The poster grabs attention by having a large striking central image but apart from that it seems to be quite minimalistic .It does however fulfill its cause by drawing the audience in without giving too much of the actual storyline away. Film posters are generally in places such as cinemas, buses, train stations and billboards. And they need to be able to catch the audience’s eye and draw them in, without being to wordy. ‘Halloween’ actually performed well with little advertising and greatly relied on word of mouth. This particular theatrical poster was created and developed by Falcon International Productions