L o b a B l a n c a {dot} c o m

Ha! I bet you thought I’d forgotten about this series, didn’t you? Never fear, this wolf has the memory of an elephant. I also share a strange fear of mice and a constant craving for peanuts. My ears will not support any attempts at flight, though, so don’t get your hopes up.

Whathafu?

Okay, for this entry, we’re going to come forward in time to this 1996 pre-Lord of the Rings offering from awesome Kiwi director Peter Jackson.

This is one of my favorite “less is more” posters. It’s clean and simple and effectively eerie. You start out with a parchment-colored canvas and the movie’s tagline, “Dead Yet?,” which has the same straightforward punch that the similarly simple “got milk” ad campaign would later flaunt—only this one’s delightfully darker.

You move down to what’s obviously not a human skull pushing through the canvas: The eye sockets are wider and slope downward into a scowl, the smile is more pronounced and demonic, the features are more angular and sinister (nice little butt-chin dimple, though!). This is a great effect and one that horror movie fans might even recognize. Those horror geeks in the know will probably recognize this as similar to the effect in A Nightmare on Elm Street, when Freddy Krueger bulges out of the wall over a sleeping Nancy Thompson. Wes Craven’s special effects team took a sheet of white spandex and stretched it behind Heather Langenkamp and had Robert Englund slowly push forward in Freddy Krueger makeup (I believe Jim Doyle was the brain behind this trick, but I’m more than likely wrong). That’s the whole effect. No CGI. Just spandex, which is arguably already a horrific material anyway, so it blends right in on a horror movie set.

You then get the name of the movie, in a nice two-toned serif font, and that’s all she wrote for this one. I love how this is all the poster gives you: tagline, provocative image, movie title. You know it’s going to have horror elements from the skull, but the irreverence of the tagline hints at a humor element as well. Funny-scary is as awesome as sexy-ugly when done right, and Peter Jackson does just that with The Frighteners.

You’ll notice that this image is a bit blurry. I believe this might be a shot of the lenticular version of this poster that was released to some theaters (or it’s just a really bad scan and I’m making excuses again). Lenticular posters are the ones that when you walk past them, the image slowly morphs into another image…kind of like 3-D but not quite. The lenticular version of this poster showed a blank canvas that, as you passed by it, showed the demonic face slowly pushing through.

I’ve been on the losing end of a couple of bidding wars for the lenticular poster. As much as I love this version, my love is cheap. This poster is not. I might just break down and seek out the regular double-sided version. Either way, this is a great poster and a great movie that I think slipped under a lot of people’s radars. I also think that a lot of people had difficulty seeing Michael J. Fox play a less-than-perfect, somewhat anti-Marty McFly character. But he gives a great performance in this movie, you can see Jeffrey Combs before he played practically EVERY ALIEN in the Star Trek televised world, the special effects were pretty ace for 1996, and it’s got John Astin as an over-sexed ghoul (not that much different from his Gomez Addams days!). If you haven’t seen it yet and you’re a fan of quirky, semi-scary movies, I’d highly recommend you give it a watch!