Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Horror movies have been around for about 120 years. Things have changed since Georges Méliès’s The Haunted Castle (although maybe not that much), not just with the movies themselves, but with the way they’re advertised, too.

Movie posters (usually featuring what’s known as “key art,” the singular image that is the foundation for a movie’s marketing campaign) have been around since the beginning of cinema. Many of the earliest have been lost to history, due to extreme wear and tear. Before the advent of television, movies toured the country from theater to theater for months, sometimes years, and the lobby posters naturally followed along with them.

They’d get torn, dirty, faded or worse, until the distributor would simply throw them away.

Still, collectors managed to rescue some of the extant film posters and restore them. Since it’s October, we thought we’d take you through a historical tour of the best (and a few of the worst) horror movie posters of the past decades....

What's amazing is just how identifiable famous movie posters can still be even after they've had all of their details stripped away.

Great design is often about the details, but what Film the Blanks also makes clear is that great design is about the the interplay of shapes and colors that make our brains light up even before our eyes can resolve the detail. 

How many can you recognize?...