Design Presentation

Horror movies are the ultimate let down in the movie industry in my own opinion because advertisements have the ability to play up the fear aspects of a movie which in reality is probably extremely poorly executed and in which you leave the theater wanting a refund for the past 90 minutes of your life wasted on a publicity stunt.  However, I am going to evaluate two films both of which I have seen and was impressed by for their execution in both cases. However, one has advertising that falls short because of it's design. I will be evaluating the official movie posters of "The Conjuring" (2013) and "The Gallows" (2015). I would like to add that the titles are similar in length so the font used is taken into consideration on a nearly even field.

First we will be looking at the poster I believe falls short in design and that is, "The Gallows." The color is the initial thing that pulls my attention. It is multiple shades of red with black and a small portion of what is considered almost white. From what we can see there is one girl on the poster who appears to be either scared or hurt. The colors pull a gestalt principle to make me believe this movie will be very bloody and violent much like "Evil Dead" which uses a similar color palette. The darkness she looks into pulls your eyes. But what it pulls away from is what we believe to be negative space at first glance. In the space on the left side of the poster is a silhouetted figure with a noose. The lines of the picture do not pull our eyes to there. The vertical line stemming off of her shoulder from the banister pulls our eyes up and not back. the banister does have a diagonal line toward the negative space however the colors pull the line into the picture making it hard to follow. The title, subtitle and date take up nearly a quarter of the page which is nice for a poster however the font is very tall and slim with thick letters which gives me the impression that the film is fast paced and probably a quick watch. It leads me to believe the movie is not based on suspense fear but on quick cheap jump scares.

"The Conjuring" has more going on then it appears at first glance. The slight sepia tone coloring makes it feel dated and eery. The line of the tree and the noose leads my eyes to the house in the distance which, much like the man in the background of "The Gallows," has a fog-ish feature surrounding it. The font is very thin letters stretched out and layered although the whole thing is in capital letters the "C" is still the biggest letter. It gives it a feeling of suspense. The tree is dead which implies both a season and based on gestalt and the feelings we receive in cinematography we know this is a spooky picture. One of the easily overlooked designs which I believe to be a fault but not a damning one is the shadow of the body that is supposedly hanging from the noose. It is transparent like a shadow would be so that you can see the leaves through it, however it is in such a dark part of the picture that it took me a long time of evaluating it to see the shadow. There are a lot more words and acknowledgements on this poster because it is a bigger studio producing it and it had a much bigger following for the debut. But the way they did the acknowledgements was in a tasteful manner with the thin lettering that does not pull your eyes away from the title or image.