Editorials
The 10 Coolest, Creepiest and Downright Best Horror Movie Posters of 2020
The theatrical release slate might have been limited this year, but it didn’t slow down horror in the slightest. Even with our most anticipated titles postponed, 2020 still delivered great genre offerings, and with it, a ton of great movie posters.
A movie trailer has an average of two minutes’ worth of highlight footage to entice audiences to purchase tickets upon release. A movie poster, however, has to do it with only a single image. When done well, a movie poster not only piques audience curiosity, but there’s an excellent chance we’ll want it acquired for our walls, too. As with any form of marketing, the poster doesn’t speak to the quality of the final product, though. No matter the film, these movie posters were creative, enticing, and often downright stunning.
Here are the ten best horror movie posters of 2020.
Archenemy
Superhero tales are often all about duality, of two competing identities. Archenemy’s poster captures that in eye-catching comic book art style. In two contrasting halves, Joe Manganiello’s Max Fist presents his two warring sides; the grimy drunk living on the streets and the superhero from an alternate dimension he claims to be. The alluring, bright-colored imagery invites you to learn more.
Gretel & Hansel
Osgood Perkins’s reimagining of the classic fairy tale injects a whole lot of style, and the poster art exemplifies that. The foreboding dark woods surround a peculiar, sharp-angled house, with the witch standing in the doorway, washed in a warm glow. It doesn’t just signal a vastly different take on the tale, but it elicits the question of what would draw Hansel and Gretel to such an uninviting place. Did you spot the hidden warning in the trees?
After Midnight
“Love will rip your heart out.” This tagline, combined with stunning creature-filled art, immediately piques your curiosity. The bleeding heart is just icing on the cake. Based on this poster alone, After Midnight successfully sells itself as the precise type of romance that the horror fan can get behind.
The Dark and the Wicked
Evil is synonymous with the color red, so it’s no surprise that one of the most nihilistic films of the year would bathe the eerie farmhouse featured in the movie in a red glow. It’s made even more frightening with the silhouette of a woman hovering midair, just below the title. It’s moody art that conveys evil, and even then, it might not prepare you for the horrors within.
The Wolf of Snow Hollow
We’re always suckers for the visual of blood spilling across pristine white snow. The poster for the horror-comedy thriller The Wolf of Snow Hollow is saturated in red, with the only untouched snow left forming an outline of a howling wolf in the wake of its lead, John Marshall (Jim Cummings). It’s the best kind of welcome mat for a horror fan.
Black Water: Abyss
The marketing for the sequel to Black Water leaned in heavily on its Descent-like premise. The unwitting adventure seekers in the film get trapped in an uncharted cave system with aggressive crocodiles thanks to flooding waters. The poster art plays that up with effective simplicity. Spelunkers unwittingly lowering themselves into the cavernous mouth of a killer croc? Brilliant.
Welcome to the Blumhouse
In October, Blumhouse launched the first half of their planed eight-movie collection “Welcome to the Blumhouse.” This gorgeous poster assembled all four titles in one dollhouse image, with the tagline “four unsettling films under one roof.” Each floor in the house is dedicated to a different movie, with genre imagery to match.
Possessor
Sometimes all it takes is a single still to sell you on a movie, which’s the case here. Just one single, striking image from Possessor is enough to get our horror-loving hearts beating faster in anticipation. The melting face on the poster stands out, even more, thanks to the single color scheme, and “lose control” sets the tone for Brandon Cronenberg’s mind-bending sci-fi horror thriller.
Color Out of Space
Richard Stanley dials up the psychedelics in his adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” both in visuals and narrative. The poster perfectly encapsulates the wild aesthetic, and it’s immediately attention-grabbing. The vivid colors pop.
Unhinged
The film itself plays like a road-rage-fueled slasher, in which Russell Crowe’s “Man” targets and stalks his prey (Caren Pistorius) while violently murdering those that cross his path. These posters capture the film’s slasher style in parody form, putting the two leads in the movie art for A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th. Its marketing is aimed directly at horror fans, and we appreciate it.
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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