28 October 2016 / in

Interview with a vampire...Ooops I mean designer

With Halloween on Monday we thought it was a good excuse to interview our senior designer Sam and find out his top five horror movie posters. We hope you enjoy reading and perhaps we will give you some inspiration of what to re-watch this Halloween!

Sam first became fascinated by horror film posters from a young age, when he used to visit his local video shop. "I would just look at this wall full of VHS covers with amazingly outlandish artwork and be desperate to watch them all, so choosing my top fve posters was harder than I thought as there are so many great posters to choose from!"

After much deliberation we are pleased to annnounce Sam's top five movie poster designs:

1. The Thing (1982)

Director: John Carpenter 

Tagline: “The ultimate in alien terror.”

The Thing poster was designed by legendary film poster artist Drew Struzan. He has been responsible for practically every iconic movie poster in history, including Indiana Jones, Star Wars and Police Academy 4! 

Apparently Struzan was briefed by the filmmakers with the ultimate deadline “We have this movie coming out, we don’t have a poster for it, we need something we can print tomorrow.” Struzan was only told the film was the same as “The Thing from Another World”. So he got his wife to take a photo of him with his winter coat on for his idea for the poster and with that he designed one of the most recognisable posters ever. Struzan worked throughout the night to complete the poster and when it was picked up the next day the paint wasn’t even dry!

2. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Director: Wes Craven 

Tagline: “Sleep kills” 

This 80’s classic went on to spawn 9 films, a TV series, a comic book and launched one of the most scariest movie characters ever, Freddy Krueger played superbly by Robert Englund. I think this was all started by British design and illustrator Graham Humpreys creating the poster and giving  the audience no idea on what to expect with the shadowy character lurking in the poster.

3. Halloween (1978)

Director: John Carpenter 

Tagline: “The night he came home.”

You couldn’t have a top horror film poster list with it not featuring John Carpenter’s 1978 classic ‘Halloween’ poster. The film makers decided that the poster would not feature the now iconic ‘Michael Myers’ mask (that was actually a kids mask of Star Trek’s William Shatner bizarrely!) and instead using a scary Jack O’Lantern illustration by Bob Gleason. 

4. Any of the Hammer Horror posters! 

 I know this is cheating but there were to many Hammer Horror posters to choose from. Some of the posters were actually better than the films themselves and that is down to the incredible  artwork by designers and illustrators such as Tom Chantrell, Arnaldo Putzu and Vic Fair. They created these sensational and colourful posters with tagline’s such as "Frankenstein spills it, Dracula drinks it!” for the The Curse of Frankenstein/Dracula double bill.