chiller blog

Posted Apr 20, 09 02:43 PM

41" x 27"

If you're a certified film enthusiast, chances are you're going to know those measurements. They're the height and width dimensions of a standard "one-sheet" - a contemporary movie poster.

True collectors will tell you that one-sheets are worth more rolled, not folded and creased into eighths or - worse yet -- sixteenths like one of those Chinese puzzles. You've got the print side. You've got the side with the cool, laminated texture. And in the bottom corner, the serial code - the one declaring the poster as property of the National Screen Service, with deliberate instructions to either return the poster to them or destroy it (Suuuuure thing. I'll have it out in today's mail! Hyuck, hyuck!).

On occasion, this won't-fit-in-your-wallet filmic calling card becomes potent advertising. On other occasions, potent advertising transcends into undeniable, indelible art.

Case in point: One of my "pass-the-time" movie games (big surprise: I have several) involves describing film posters until someone correctly guesses the title. Sound dry? Consider this…

"I'm thinking of a poster surrounded in a black box frame, with the title in bold red letters. The upper third shows daylight and a naked female figure swimmer doing the American Crawl. The lower two thirds are water, increasingly dark. From the depths, a large creature is heading for the surface, bubbles coming out of - "

Likely, by now, you've been wanting to blurt out "Jaws!" And you'd be correct.

Now, let's let this sink in for a sec. I just described a marketing tool created thirty-four years ago - a lightning stroke of conceptualization that's permanently ingrained into our cinema lexicon. It is beyond graphic art. As with the film it represents, it is art.

American film posters have evolved from more than just horizontal to vertical frames. They have, with decreasing exceptions, translated into the summation of one dominant image. The neon-cracked egg of Alien. The priest bathed in the foggy Georgetown streetlight in The Exorcist. The skeletal Creeper behind the vintage ticket window for Creepshow. Michael Douglas's and Glenn Close's torrid passion torn by the dagger-dipped crimson of Fatal Attraction. Even a bulging-eyed teen victim about to take a shish-ka-bob skewer in Happy Birthday to Me (The poster was the best thing about THAT one). You "see" the movie.

Unfortunately, nowadays, contractual talent frequently mandates prominent images of performers on star vehicles, reducing the one sheet to an exercise in creative layout. Successfully marketing a movie means building pre-awareness. But fortunately, with horror titles, the concept still drives the art. Here, successful marketing means building pre-tension.

Take the exquisite one-sheet for the remake of The Last House on the Left. Dark background. The locale sketched and foreshadowed in the washed-out hues of an approaching storm. The metaphor is simple. Clean. Clear. The title is emblazoned in uncomplicated white with uneasy smears of red. The tagline sticks in your craw: "If Bad People Hurt Someone You Love, How Far Would You Go to Hurt Them Back?"

That's a campaign of diabolical suggestion that will guarantee me a theater seat on the opening weekend.

But before my ticket stub gets torn, I linger. Few filmgoers beyond industryites and circles of collectors take note that the stroll through a theater lobby can be a literal museum path past artists' careers. People like Saul Bass, who brilliantly evoked the spirals of Hitchcock's Vertigo, giving us a sucked-in Jimmy Stewart silhouette trying to rescue a transparent outline of Kim Novak. Or, Tom Jung. This gentleman painted a midnight canvas of an off-centered, seemingly harmless boy… whose shadow transforms into a ravenous wolf. The tagline: "You Have Been Warned." Of course, I'm describing The Omen. Then there's Drew Struzan's work on John Carpenter's The Thing. Again, a black box frame. We are low angle on the title creature, dressed in a parka, arms menacingly extended. A spectrum of light and ice shapes backlight him/it, leaving the face - and identity - indiscernible.

These are some of the great images we retain from those films - except, funny, they are not IN the films.

Classic posters play on the Pavlovian Effect, triggering nostalgia. It's bittersweet to know there are no more first times for going back and re-experiencing - fresh - say, The Dead Zone or Scanners. But these rarities under glass are transporting reminders of what sparked the initial bond between viewer and movie. And in poster art, we see our films forever in motion.