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.
Jaws – Robert Kastel
Pulp Fiction – James Verdesoto
Pulp Fiction - James Verdesoto (1994)
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.
Star Wars - Tom Jung (1977)
Stars Wars had generated such a significant buzz before its release that several now-famous posters were distributed before the first movie landed on our screens in 1977. For the purposes of this article, we’re going to focus on perhaps the most famous, Tom Jung’s original 1977 poster.
A masterful composition, it set the trend for future Star Wars movie posters.
All of them were to going to be action-packed, all of them were going to help build an image of this immersive galaxy, all of them were going to portray the characters like action deities, and all of them were going to be so minutely detailed that fans would be poring over them for decades.
Star Wars – Tom Jung
Anatomy of a Murder – Saul Bass
Anatomy of a Murder - Saul Bass (1959)
With films like 1958’s Vertigo and 1959’s Anatomy of a Murder, American artist Saul Bass helped set a powerful new trend in movie posters – you didn’t need to include an image or still from the movie itself to make a compelling poster.
In Anatomy of a Murder, Bass’ image – of limbs and head which have been separated from a body and which lie on the ground like a crime scene – asks us to pay particular attention to the fragile, malleable nature of the human anatomy.
With his minimal artwork, our interest is piqued and a memorable image is born.
Alien - Steve Frankfurt and
Philip Gips (1979)
Released in 1979, Alien helped give the sci-fi horror/action genre a newfound slice of respectability – even as it went about scaring the bejesus out of everyone who watched it.
The film’s poster is almost entirely black, with only supernatural green plasma – leaking from an egg – providing light.
The poster is minimal but suggestive. We’re not only curious about the strange green plasma, we’re also curious about what we don’t see.
But above all, the tagline is what really won audiences over with this film. “In space, no one can hear you scream” is a completely perfect piece of copy. It raised the bar for how taglines and images could work together.
Alien – Steve Frankfurt/Philip Gips
The Exorcist – Bill Gold
The Exorcist - Bill Gold (1958)
The 1970s were a decade of extremes in American cinema, with many filmmakers turning to the horror genre to tap into our darkest fears about life, home, community, and wider society. With The Exorcist, the rulebook for horror movies was completely rewritten.
The poster for The Exorcist captures a scene in the middle of the movie where Father Merrin arrives at the MacNeil residence and stands outside their house, silhouetted by the streetlamp and by the glow from the bedroom window.
The scene precedes the audience seeing the full extent of Regan’s possession. According to actress Ellen Burstyn, who played Regan’s mother in the film, the scene was inspired by René Magritte’s 1954 painting Empire of Light.
Although it’s an understated choice for such a graphically violent film, the simple black and white contrasts, as well as the eerie glow of the bedroom light, are unnerving and give audiences a fearful sense of what is to come.
Metropolis - Heinz Schulz-Neudamm (1927)
Few films have cast as long and strange a shadow as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. In his vision of a dystopian near future, Lang’s artistic reach was detailed, original, and all-encompassing.
The movie poster for Metropolis, which was designed by artist Heinz Schulz-Neudamm, was also an important proponent in selling this brave new world to an audience that had no idea what it was in for. The poster depicts the strange, domineering, dividing architecture of the film, as well as giving an artfully-rendered first glimpse of the humanoid robot Hel.
Metropolis – Heinz Schulz-Neudamm
Silence of the Lamb – Dawn Bailie
Silence of the Lambs - Dawn Bailie (1991)
In a movie famed for its sadistic storyline, its unnerving POV directing techniques, and its ability to knock you sideways with twists, The Silence of the Lambs’ movie poster demanded that audiences look closer to try to unravel its unnerving mysteries.
The movie poster, designed by artist Dawn Bailie, was packed full of brilliant symbolism that was relevant to the film. Everything – from Clarice Sterling’s red eyes, to her cadaver-white skin, to the moth on her lips, to the skull on the moth’s head, to the incredible fact that the skull is actually an artwork by Salvador Dali made up of human bodies made to look like a skull – has something which is related to the movie itself.
It’s no wonder this poster was named the ‘Best Movie Poster of the past 35 years’ in 2006.
The Godfather - S. Neil Fujita (1972)
Having won dozens of awards, found itself on numerous ‘Best of all time…’ movie lists, and marked the high point in the careers of some of the greatest actors alive, gangster epic The Godfather needs little introduction. But behind this great movie is an equally great poster, which deserves high praise for turning a simple idea into an instantly recognisable image.
The poster was based heavily on the cover for Mario Puzo’s The Godfather book, which sold over nine million copies before the movie landed on cinema screens. That fact, coupled with the fact that the poster featured a sharp, black-and-white image of Marlon Brando as you’d never seen him before, meant that the choice for a great movie poster was actually quite an obvious one. You can almost hear the team of marketers and artists saying: “Let’s use our bankable movie star. Let’s use our recognisable book cover imagery.”
The Godfather – S. Neil Fujita
Blade Runner – John Alvin
Blade Runner - John Alvin (1982)
Ridley Scott’s neo-noir, cyberpunk, futuristic epic Blade Runner has carved out a cult classic reputation for itself which is unparalleled in modern cinema. A massive part of this comes down to its compelling visual aesthetic.
The Blade Runner poster was designed by artist John Alvin, who also designed movie posters for some of the most iconic films of all time, including ET, The Goonies, and Blazin’ Saddles.
According to numerous reports, Alvin discussed the idea for the poster at length with Ridley Scott, telling him early on that he believed that architecture needed to be a prominent feature.
His finished poster reflects the dystopian architecture of the movie – the endless windows of endless apartment boxes, the pervasive police cars – as well as dramatically sketched faces of Deckard and Rachael, which pays homage to an old-school noir poster style.
The Shining - Saul Bass (1980)
The original Shining movie poster went through hundreds of rejections, iterations, and back-and-forths between artist Saul Bass and director Stanley Kubrick until the right one was decided upon – all before the movie studio went ahead and used a completely different poster for the international release of the film. In the chaos of promoting the horror film, two iconic depictions of the movie were born.
The first: An artistic work by Saul Bass with a yellow background that depicts a warped, terrified child’s face made with pointillist art, inside the ‘T’and ‘H’ of the title, written as ‘The SHiNiNG. The story goes that Bass made as many as 300 different designs to arrive at this eerily beautiful poster.
The Shining – Saul Bass
Apocalypse Now – Bob Peak
Apocalypse Now - Bob Peak (1979)
Designed by artist Bob Peak, the Apocalypse Now poster captures so much of what makes this movie powerful. Soaked in a crimson red which is both tropical and suggestive of blood, the poster offers a terrifying vision of Marlon Brando’s character Colonel Kurtz and Martin Sheen’s character Captain Willard.
Look at the boat creeping through the dark river. Look at the dazzle of the lights. Look at the dots of numerous helicopters poking through the skyline. Already, before you’ve sat in your cinema seat, you feel like you’re experiencing the dark chaos of war.
Conclusion
If all of the films listed above are considered some of the best of all time, then their iconic posters played no small part in helping them to get there.
Each poster is imaginative in its own way, playing around with its source material and finding new ways to hook viewers in. Each poster helped provide a certain expectation before a movie was released, as well as a way of understanding it after it had been viewed.
The lesson? Well, if there’s any lesson at all, it’s that the right movie poster can be just as iconic as a great film.
