Iconic Movie Posters
As well as being an effective marketing tool, posters have a certain way of capturing the aesthetic of a film, meaning that they’re both a promotional tool and an original form of artistic expression. And because of this, some movie posters have become iconic movie posters.
Think of how often you’ve walked into an art house cinema or some cool cafe and seen a famous, framed movie poster on the wall.
We place a high value on good posters, and their reputations can even outlast the films they were made for.
With all that in mind, here are 12 of the most iconic movie posters ever made:
Jaws - Robert Kastel (1975)
For a movie that has had such a strong cultural impact and which relies on the fear of its threatening seabound mammal, it’s easy to forget that you almost never actually see the shark in Jaws.
Spielberg himself has said that movie production issues and technical constraints meant that he had to rely on ominous music and the sense of the shark’s presence as fear-making devices, rather than props or editing.
So why do we have such a clear image of the shark from the film?
For that, we can thank artist Robert Kastel (who helped design the paperback cover for the Jaws book). Kastel, alongside The Seiniger Advertising agency, took an unprecedented six months to develop the film’s poster.
The result? A terrifying image of a larger-than-life shark poised to emerge from the water and attack an unsuspecting woman. Look at how the poster gets under the shark and highlights its disjointed teeth and cavernous mouth. Look at how the swish of the water makes it feel like this is happening in real-time. You want to reach out and warn the woman of what’s coming.
This image is unforgettable and the poster is about as effective as you could ask for.
Widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, Pulp Fiction is nonetheless very fragmented, episodic, and contains a diverse cast of characters. With that in mind, a single movie poster could only ever share so much information.
But artist James Verdesoto managed to capture the dark allure of the movie in a unique way.
The movie poster for Pulp Fiction sees Uma Thurman (as her character Mia Wallace), propped up on a pillow and staring out at the viewer. The poster pays homage to the covers of ‘pulp’ magazines – cheap fiction magazines that were popular in the early part of the 20th century.
Verdesoto makes heavy use of the pulp magazine design element in his poster. There’s the thick red banner (used a lot in pulp magazine covers). There’s the fact that the names are displayed prominently like eye-grabbing magazine headlines. And there’s the fact that the poster has a price marker on it.
That’s all before mentioning the seductive image of Uma Thurman smoking a cigarette on a bed in some low-lit room that looks like it could be a motel. This, again, was part of the pulp magazine ethos – ham up the sex, ham up the vice, ham up the seediness.
