Textual Analysis of Scream Film Poster

This is the film poster that accompanies 1996 film Scream. It is the first of the Scream series. The film tells the story of the fictional town Woodsboro, CA being terrorized by a masked killer who enjoys tormenting his victims with phone calls and movie references. The killer's main target is Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), a teenage girl whose mother Maureen fell victim to a brutal murder one year earlier. The film takes on a ‘who done it’ mystery, with many of her friends and townspeople being fellow targets and suspects.

The median of this product is print in the form of a poster. The ideology behind this poster is that it is supposed to keep the audience guessing, much like the film itself. The genre of this product is gory horror. The representation of this poster is shocking and is meant to show the film will be action packed. The audience that this poster is intended for like all other horror films is an older audience. The institution behind the film is Dimension Films. The narrative of the poster is quite simple but does contain more text than other film posters I have looked at.

The main image on the poster is of a close up of a young girl’s face. The girl’s eyes are very wide and she looks shocked, like in the Jeepers Creepers film poster, the eyes follow the viewer. This is to attract their attention and be direct to the viewer. The girl is very pale, this could suggest she is very frightened or has been killed or it could even mean that she is a ghost. There are many different possibilities that this image can suggest to the audience which makes them intrigued to find out what is really going on in the film. The girl has a hand covering her mouth, this also suggest different things to the audience. Is it her hand? And she is covering her mouth because she is shocked. Or it could even be someone else’s hand that is covering her mouth to stop her from screaming.

The poster is in black and white, this could represent the darkness of death or the darkness of the murderer. It could also be a comparison between the black and white of the poster and how discovering who the murderer is is not black and white meaning that it is not clear who the murderer is.

There is some narrative at the top of the poster in white text. ‘Someone has taken their love of scary movies too far. Solving this mystery is going to be murder.’ This text gives the audience a clearer understanding of what the film will be about because it shows that it will be a film that is based upon finding out who is committing murders. This text also makes the audience feel that the film could be true because it talks about everyday stuff like ‘scary movies’. By talking about a ‘scary movie’ in a scary movie it makes the film feel less fictional. By using the word ‘murder’ to describe how hard it will be to find the killer who committed the murders give the word a double meaning, it also has a lot of significance. The text is also an introduction to the poster and allows the audience to have their own opinion on what might occur in the film.

‘Scream’ is written along the bottom in white, bold, block capital letters. As it is big the audience notices it, because it is big and bold it represents how a scream is because it is big and loud. The title is spaced out across the page; this could represent the length of a scream and show it is long. Also the end letter ‘M’ has been edited. The middle has been stretched downwards so that it has a sharp point. This represents a knife which the victims are killed by.

Unlike the other film poster I have looked at, in this film poster there are seven of the actors and actresses names shown at the bottom under the title. The actors that star in this film are quite well known which is why they have been shown to try and entice the audience to want to watch the film. Drew Barrymore’s name is placed under the ‘M’ which is made to look like a dagger. This has been done intentionally because in the film, the character played by Drew Barrymore, Casey, is the first to be killed.

At the very bottom of the page there is more text. ‘The highly anticipated thriller from Wes Craven.’ His name has been put on the poster because he also created ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ which is also a very popular and well known horror film. If the audience notices that he has also created this film it might tempt them to go and watch it because they enjoyed his previous film.

I think that the ideologies of the film have been portrayed successfully in this film poster because features of the poster suggest and relate to scenes from the film. The poster also lets the audience come to their own conclusions about what will happen in the film and it suggests lots of different possibilities to the audience. Each feature of the poster also follows the same codes and conventions so the theme is consistent.