Dread X: BOOK OF MONSTERS’ Stewart Sparke’s Top 10 Horror Movie Posters
This coming Tuesday sees the release of DREAD’s latest title, Book of Monsters! The film follows a young woman and her friends as they celebrate her 18th birthday only for several monsters deciding this is the best time to come and hang out. It’s most certainly a party movie and we can’t wait for you and your friends to have a blast with it!
As you can see by the poster on the right, Stewart Sparke (director of the film) and his team were insistent that everything about the film
“Sophie’s 18th birthday becomes a bloodbath when monsters descend upon her house and start to devour the party guests. Sophie and her friends must rally together to send their party crashers back to hell.“
Written by Paul Butler and directed by Stewart Sparke, Book of Monsters stars Anna Dawson, Lizzie Aaryn-Stanton, Lyndsey Craine, Michaela Longden, Rose Muirhead, and Steph Mossman.
To order your copy, simply head on over to Epic-Pictures.com!
Alien
I remember first seeing this poster on the cover of the novelization my Dad had on our bookshelf at home before I’d even seen the film and it filled me with such desire to find out what was inside that egg! After several years of child hood nightmares, Alien became one of my favourite horror movies and the poster just oozes mystery much like the green light cracking through the egg. A minimalist design with a tagline that inspires so much dread for what is about to hatch!
The Evil Dead
This poster is such a perfect visual representation of the film’s title and also promises exactly what is delivered in Sam Raimi’s classic movie. You can see some inspiration in Drag Me to Hell’s poster years later and the image of a woman being pulled into the ground by a demonic arm is so striking against the murky blue background. Having the title tilted on an angle along with the artwork is a great touch and makes this classic image one you must have on your wall!
Jaws
A poster that has inspired so many others (I’m looking at you Tremors), Jaws is so simple and yet so effective. We see exactly the kind of terror that just the thought of sharks invokes in all of us when we’re just out for a nice swim in the ocean and the poster alone is enough to make you think twice before taking a trip to the beach. The film lives up to the promise of the poster and more.
Halloween
Like Alien, the Halloween poster is such an eye-catching design that uses a truly creative central image and a brilliant tagline to pull in the audience. Who is ‘He’ and what happened when he came home?! The knife and pumpkin design are so iconic, and I love the way the clenched fist blends into a fleshy pumpkin as it stretches farther into the distance. Menacing and promising some victims at the end of the blade, the poster is one of the all-time greats.
Friday the 13th
I absolutely adore the image within a silhouette design for Friday the 13th and the way in which the blood drips from the blade onto the title below. As slasher films were really hitting their stride, so too was the poster art and Friday the 13th really knocked it out of the park with a poster that promises what has since become classic horror fodder – teens in a cabin in the woods.
The Stuff
If the demanding red text at the top of the poster doesn’t draw your attention, then the horrific sight of a man being consumed by The Stuff certainly will. Like some kind of twisted anti-drugs poster the government put out in the 70s, The Stuff poster is extremely effective in making you take a second glance and the added text which describes what exactly the stuff will do to you promises a very gory movie!
Re-Animator
I don’t know if the artwork or the tagline came first but Herbert West certainly does have a good head on his shoulders in Jeffery Combs. I have a slight obsession with the Stuart Gordon classic (not to mention Barbara Crampton) and the poster is fantastic at getting across the humorous and macabre story the film delivers on. The art style of the Book of Monsters poster was certainly inspired by the way in which Herbert West is drawn here and that’s no accident! Visually striking and promising lots of mad scientist mischief, this is one for the wall!
Hellraiser
One of the few posters on this list that isn’t hand painted, Clive Barkers masterpiece gives us Pinhead offering us an invitation to partake in something not safe for work and the collection of hooks and chains on the wall behind him give us a taste of what’s to come! Doug Bradley’s looming figure with his snarling face is enough to give any child nightmares and like Alien before it, this film is another that gave me many sleepless nights. When the Chatterer himself Nicholas Vince joined us in his role on Book of Monsters, I made sure to keep a safe distance. Thankfully he didn’t bring his puzzle box to set.
The Silence of the Lambs
So simple and yet so effective. The movie is a masterpiece and the poster couldn’t be a more perfect fit for the themes in Jonathan Demme’s chilling adaptation of the superb Thomas Harris novel. The subtle detail of the female figures on the moth’s in a skull pattern is a great touch which I never even noticed until recent years. Have the lambs stopped screaming?
The Thing
Probably my all time favorite horror poster, Drew Struzan’s The Thing is a true work of art worthy of the superb John Carpenter classic. The poster was famously painted without Drew ever having seen the film and only having one evening to finish it, resulting in the courier coming to collect it finding the paint still wet! The image of the humanoid figure dressed in winter clothing is both foreboding and mysterious, capturing the paranoia within the story. Anyone could be the thing and that thing could be you! On a side note unrelated to the poster, I can’t be the only one that is always in awe of McReady’s giant hat in the movie? Watch it again and you’ll see what I mean!
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