Iconography and Ideology

• Horror Iconography and Ideology:

horror posters - slide show

I decided to use a slideshow to show the images of the posters to make my blog less boring. Since I haven't used a slide show like this before I thought it would be interesting to experiment with. I found this slide show very simple to use but found that I couldn't put text on the slide show, which would have made it less confusing.

Saw:

T The title that we can see on the poster is quite small but effective since it merges with the gruesome image.

The title ‘Saw’ is in a white colour to make it stand out since it’s quite small.

The font of the title look as though they are the man’s teeth, this makes the title very effective.

In the poster we as the audience only see the image of a man’s moth wide open and a bit of the bottom half of his face. Like many horror posters they try not to show a lot on the poster so that the audience are more intrigued (as this poster does).

In the image it is very obvious to an audience that the man is in pain, we can tell this because most of his teeth have been pulled out and there is a hook in his mouth.

Even though we can’t see most of his face we know that this character on the poster is being tortured. Like most of ‘Saw’s’ posters they always show someone being tortured so if a ‘Saw’ fan you can tell what is going on in the poster without giving away too much of the plot of the film.

The tag line ‘ Opening wide this Halloween’ is very humorous and relates well to the image.

The Last Exorcism:

The font of the title ‘The Last Exorcism’ is quite Gothic this relates to the time that the film is set and creates a spooky atmosphere to the poster.

The colour of the font is black which contrasts with the bright off white background.

The use of the bright background creates shadows from the image of the girl on the wall, this makes the poster more effectively scary and informs the audience of the genre of the film.

The image of the girl on the wall is very haunting and the position of her body makes her look unnatural or inhuman; the positioning of her body is quite spider like. Since the image of the girl is in the corner of the wall it could be said that the photographer decided to position it this way so that it would look as if the girl is ready to pounce out of the picture. This makes the image more thrilling and makes it a must see.

30 days of night:

The main colours of the poster are black and red. These colours are associated with death, night, blood and fear. This meaning that the film might consist of these themes.

The Blair Witch Project:

The title is written like you would see witchcraft written. This could be a link to the title being ‘The Blair witch project’. The letters are very spaced out from each other, representing isolation, which links to the image of the woods.

There is then a short paragraph on what the film is going to be about, the word ‘disappeared’ makes the audience curious and adds to the effect of horror.

The image is of a wood, this gives an insight into where the film will be set, and also it is written in the small paragraph.

The image looks like a negative Polaroid, which adds to the found footage. This makes the tree’s stand out and look ghostly and have a spirit feel to them. The colours black and white remind us of death.

From analysing both of these horror film posters I have noticed that they both have some similarities. The font styles of both titles are in capitals this could be that they want their audiences to be drawn in by the title and remember the name of it. Both images don’t reveal too much of their characters faces, this technique that quite a lot of horror posters do is to intrigue the audience and really make them think about the film and what it might be about. The colouring of both images are quite interesting. They’re both similar in the sense that the lighting is quite light to exaggerate certain elements of the image. For instance ‘The Last Exorcism’ uses quite a light background to create and exaggerate the shadows on the wall. In the ‘Saw’ image they have used light lighting to emphasise the man’s mouth to create a gruesome feel.