Editorials
The 10 Best Horror Movie Posters of 2016!
5 Pretty Good Horror Movies You Might’ve Missed in 2016
[Poll Results] The Bloody Disgusting Readers Chose the 10 Best Horror Movies of 2016
10 Biggest Horror Stories of 2016
Let’s Play Pretend and Give Academy Awards to 2016’s Best Horror Movies
A poster is the best marketing tool for a film outside of its trailer. When I was a kid (before the days when posters were plastered all over the internet), I used to get to the movie theater 45 minutes early so I would have time to walk the halls and look at all of the posters for the coming attractions. There’s just something so fun about looking at posters and horror films arguably have the best ones. This year saw some particularly creative posters get released, so I’ve put together a list of some of my favorites. With that being said, here are 10 of the best posters for horror films released this year!*
*Keep in mind that this is a judgment on the poster only. The quality of the movie has nothing to do with the posters included on this list.
10. 10 Cloverfield Lane
The marketing team being Dan Trachtenberg’s 10 Cloverfield Lane deserves an award for their efforts. After keeping the film’s true identity a secret for so long (its working title was Valencia) the surprise trailer was released a mere two months before the film was. The poster take the minimalist approach, using the slight imagery of a house on top of black space to allude to the isolation Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) feels in the film.
9. The Shallows
Simplicity is the name of the game in the poster for The Shallows, which highlights a fear-inducing point-of-view shot from a shark. It makes no qualms about ripping off a similar shot from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. The tagline is pretty clever (and very literal) as well, considering that the film was initially titled In the Deep.
8. The Neon Demon
The poster for Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon is a lot like the film itself: not a lot of substance but it’s very pretty to look at. Look how it sparkles!
7. Nina Forever
It’s easy to appreciate when a poster is upfront and honest with you about the movie it is advertising. This risqué poster for the British horror comedy Nina Forever does just that. It is most definitely a “fucked up fairy tale.” You’ve got to admire its candor.
6. Lights Out
Do you detect a trend in the types of posters that I like? The poster for David F. Sandberg’s Lights Out features the simple image of a light switch secured to the on position with duct tape. Do you need to know anything else about the film? Nope.
Up Next: The 5 Best Horror Movie Posters of 2016!
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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