Maybe I’m just a lot more aware of it these days because of the site, but it seems like the special poster for a screening/limited run for sale thing has exploded over the last couple of years. Not that I’m complaining, plenty of great stuff being created, some of which I have even bought for myself.

To celebrate some of that “stuff”, here are a few Halloween appropriate posters. 

First, from the guys over at Skuzzles, here are two posters by Rhys Cooper for two Troma cult classics:

These will be sold separately AND in a two-for-one combined print. The sale starts some random time tomorrow (November 1st) . If you are interested, go here.

Next, from Derek Gabryszak, here is a red hot one for Suspiria, which went on sale today over here.

And since we are talking about Derek, here is another one he made for Fargo:

Ok, that one isn’t so Halloween, buy it is cool, so…

A character poster for the director of the movie. That is an … interesting approach. Or depending on who actually pushed for it, an interestingly megalomaniacal approach.

It’s true that Von Trier is probably the main attraction in this movie, at least to the movie obsessed audience (as opposed to the “let’s see what’s playing, oh, a movie with Kirsten Dunst, I liked her in Spider-Man!” audience. And oh boy is this particular audience in for a rough time at the movies) . So, it’s not crazy to shine the spotlight on him. But I have followed the guy’s work for some time now, and up until today I had no idea what he looked like, so I’m not sure how much mileage you get from using his face.

I guess It’s probably an alright idea for a series of posters like this.

Looking at the other character posters, I liked the interplay between the “Enjoy It While It Lasts” and the “Melancholia Is Coming” taglines. Only works if you are seeing several of the posters at the same time, but when you do, it carries some punch.

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From the Wikipedia article:
“In the California desert, a tire comes to life and embarks on a killing spree as an audience watches the events unfold through binoculars. The tire kills by vibrating intensely and psycho-kinetically causing people’s heads to explode.”
To be honest, this sounds like one of those concepts that sounds great on paper, but doesn’t really translate into an engaging feature length film. But I could be wrong! And the posters certanly are something.

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It’s Tom Cruise… In a hoodie! Edgy! Hip! Kinda wrong seeming for his age!

Honestly, I’m not really getting what the idea was here with the wardrobe choice. Is Tom a wizard and/or a rapper in the new M:I movie? Because that would be interesting.

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Young Adult is the name of this movie. It is also a lit genre. And the film has as its main character an author (of young adult books? I don’t know). So, inspired by all that, we get a poster that looks like a book cover. Clever idea, and they really went the extra mile here to make it look like a book, to the point where the poster looked slightly off at first to me, until I figured what was going on.

I do wonder if this looks like a cover for a Young Adult book though. I mean, it looks oddly antiquated to me. The emphasis on being a hard cover, the colors and the scratches are particularly jarring. The actual picture inside the cover reads to me a lot more like something you might see in the cover of an YA book, not so much in the details, but in the overall feel.

I guess that without emphasising the hardcover it’s hard to portray book? Not much difference between the cover of a paperback and a movie poster, really. Well, very different traditions and tropes, but nothing that clearly would scream “This is a BOOK!”

Then again, maybe it all ties in into the themes of the film? Maybe the main character (played by Charlize Theron, by the way, who, in a choice that feels true to book covers, doesn’t actually show her face) is getting older but still trying to act like she is young? And this is represented by the worn out hard cover for a Young Adult book? Could be!

As you can probably notice, I’ve thought quite a bit about this poster in the last few days. And because of that I’m much more aware of the film than I was before. Not that there was ever a chance that I wouldn’t go see the movie in theaters, but anyway, maybe it had the same effect in someone who was a more iffy prospect.

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So, for context, ‘The Artist’ is a movie about a silent star struggling with the advent of sound, that itself is a black and white silent movie. It was apparently quite the hit in Cannes and will be released in the U.S. in November.

The poster, which is mostly black and white (and silent!) is perfectly evocative of that coolness and glamour we now associate (fairly or not) with the pre-sound period, and clearly marks the film as a high-minded, ‘artistic’ film. It’s not necessarily very evocative of the actual posters that were produced back them, but that doesn’t strike me as very important. This is, after all, a modern film, catering to a modern audience, despite the use of old-fashioned techniques.

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This design is, in general terms, fine. Minimalistic and clean. But I would like to raise two objections:

1) I really hate the proliferation of QR codes in posters. I knows, this is a highly personal preference, and it probably marks me as some sort of neo-luddite, out-of-touch, old person, but there it is.

2) Quick, what’s the name of the film? Well, you probably read this post’s title, so you know. But think of this from the perspective of someone encountering just the poster. As a general rule, if you have a somewhat long, somewhat hard to remember name, the last thing you want to do is hide said name by making it seem like a list of actresses that are in the movie.

Of course, I’m ready to admit that the biggest problem here is that the name is awful (from a marketing perspective at least) and that it is very hard to work it into an image. And I sympathize with the poster designer’s wish that the movie was simply called M. But it isn’t, and just giving up doesn’t seem like a good answer.

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So Luc Besson is making a movie, called The Lady, about Burmese pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi. A couple of years ago, artist Shepard Fairey made a poster celebrating the real Aung San Suu Kyi, which went on to become somewhat famous. So now the guys behind the film asked him to come up with a version of that poster that they could use to promote the film. The result can be seen above, the original poster is below and a statement from Shepard can be read here.

An obvious choice, but a good one nevertheless. Even if the new poster doesn’t add anything, artistically speaking, to the previous one.

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I’m pretty sure American Reunion is a bad idea, likely to lead to a bad movie. I mean, considering that this series has already released a bunch of straight to video films, how can I believe that this is anything but a somewhat desperate attempt from a bunch of people to revive more successful days? Considering that the third movie was clearly already meant to be a final outing, what makes this one any more of a “last”? And doesn’t the fact that they had to go back to a gag from the very first movie show that this is a series that ran out of steam a looooooong time ago?

That said, this is the movie, and all the advertising people can do is work with whatever material they have. And this is a pretty good example of doing that. They created a simple, clean and clearly identifiable image that makes us think of the best moments in the series. Can’t really ask for much more than that.

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Considering this together with the poster for Contagion that was released a while ago we can already see the cool new trend: Posters with a weathered look that are mostly taken by the title, displayed vertically. Hott.

Honestly, I like both posters, probably because I’m just a sucker for a weathered, beaten down look (remember how much fun I had with Grindhouse posters?). But the poster for contagion strikes me as the superior effort.

First, because the the choice of visual elements and iconography matches so well with the theme of the film. It complements the message, instead of being just something cool to look at.

Second, because of it’s use of city names, a clever little way of conveying the huge scope of the disaster without relying on some epic images, which they might not have been able to get from the film itself. Again, looks good, but also tells me something about the story.

The character posters, on the other hand, left me pretty cold. The tagline is great though.

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