look over the shoulder pose holding knives

The sets were built deliberately askew, the actors’ faces heavily made up the art department even painted unnatural shadows on the ground. In fact, this is pretty much what The Cabinet of Dr.

You might think this poster’s abstract art style with its impossible angles and looming, impractical structures is an odd fit for a film, which is, inherently, a mimetic medium (which means it looks like the thing it represents).

Since it’s October, we thought we’d take you through a historical tour of the best (and a few of the worst) horror movie posters of the past decades. Still, collectors managed to rescue some of the extant film posters and restore them. They’d get torn, dirty, faded or worse, until the distributor would simply throw them away. Before the advent of television, movies toured the country from theater to theater for months, sometimes years, and the lobby posters naturally followed along with them.

Many of the earliest have been lost to history, due to extreme wear and tear.

Movie posters (usually featuring what’s known as “key art,” the singular image that is the foundation for a movie’s marketing campaign) have been around since the beginning of cinema. Things have changed since Georges Méliès’s The Haunted Castle (although maybe not that much ), not just with the movies themselves, but with the way they’re advertised, too. Horror movies have been around for about 120 years.

Look over the shoulder pose holding knives