Editorials
The 10 Coolest, Creepiest, and Most Stunning Horror Movie Posters of 2021
Where movie trailers can capture an audience’s attention with a montage of scenes, a poster must do it with a single image. It needs to grab you immediately. When done well, a movie poster not only piques curiosity but there’s an excellent chance we’ll want it on our walls, too.
Whether the image matches the film or lives up to the potential teased is a different story. These particular movie posters were creative, enticing, and often breathtaking works of art.
Here are the ten best horror movie posters of 2021.
Old (Universal Pictures)
“A new trip from M. Night Shyamalan,” indeed. This single image tells you everything you need to know about the plot, which isn’t an easy task. With the gradual aging on one half of the figure’s body, it takes an otherwise scenic, relaxing beach picture and makes it unsettling.
The Spine of Night (RLJE Films)
It’s fitting that a sprawling, rotoscoped fantasy epic should get a poster that’s a work of art itself. The vibrant colors, ethereal art, and the Lucy Lawless-voiced witch at the center command your attention.
We Need to Do Something (IFC Films)
Sometimes it’s the most straightforward designs that intrigue us the most. One close-up shot of an eye exuding pure, visceral terror is all it takes to sign us up for whatever horrors lie in wait in We Need to Do Something. Washing it in horror’s favorite color, red, is another stroke of minimalistic genius.
Malignant (New Line Cinema)
This excellent piece of pulp art conveys everything you need to know about James Wan’s latest. It tells you to expect a heavily Giallo-inspired horror movie, and that identity could be a central clue to unlocking the movie’s wild murder mystery.
Army of the Dead (Netflix)
If you want a quick, easy way to catch someone’s eye, make your poster pop with bright, vibrant hues and Vegas-style flash. Then make it horror. Netflix’s Army of the Dead introduced a series of vivid posters unafraid to embrace the neon, and it worked like a charm.
Fear Street Trilogy (Netflix)
Apart, each poster in Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy captured the tone and imagery of their respective installments. But lining all three up together and seeing how they bleed into another?
Very, very cool.
Last Night in Soho (Focus)
Edgar Wright’s horror thriller follows a modern fashion design student traveling back in time to London’s Soho district during the Swinging Sixties. This poster captures that perfectly, both in style and in evoking the period era.
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (New Line Cinema)
The original theatrical poster for The Devil Made Me Do It marketed the safe bet- Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, respectively). For their fourth appearance in the Conjuring universe, it seemed safe to assume they are why audiences keep coming back for more. We love this cinematic couple, but the theatrical poster doesn’t hold a candle to the IMAX poster, an eye-grabbing work of comic-style horror art.
PG: Psycho Goreman (RLJE Films)
This stunningly gory work of art by Brock Hofer perfectly captures the tone and madness of Steven Kostanski’s horror-comedy riff on sentai. So many intergalactic monsters and fleshy bits across the page, covering every inch.
Prisoners of a Ghostland (RLJE Films)
Sion Sono’s English-language debut is an East-meets-West dystopian journey into madness, but this stunning poster goes all-in on the East aesthetic. Nicolas Cage stands atop a collage of samurai, bones, and characters along the way. It’s weird cinema meets beautiful poetry, and we need this one on our walls.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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