Movies
These Iconic Horror Posters Look Beautiful With the Text Removed
It’s almost like seeing your favorite poster art for the first time.
After artists get done creating movie poster art, the art is then covered in all sorts of text, including the movie’s title and often even a list of credits. Of course, a movie poster doesn’t do much good if it doesn’t even tell you what movie it’s advertising, but wouldn’t it be cool to go back in time and look at all of your favorite poster art BEFORE all that necessary text was slapped on it?
Over on Imgur, user “joinyouinthesun” uploaded a massive gallery of hi-res, totally textless art from his favorite movies – thankfully for us, he’s clearly a big time horror fan. Presumably using Photoshop, he removed all of the text from the iconic posters for films such as Alien, The Thing, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Jaws and Candyman, allowing the art itself to fully shine.
[Related] Check Out All the Original ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ Poster Paintings Without Text
You’re here to look at art, not listen to us ramble. So enjoy!
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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