Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Horror movies have been around for about 120 years. 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.

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

They’d get torn, dirty, faded or worse, until the distributor would simply throw them away.

Still, collectors managed to rescue some of the extant film posters and restore them. 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....

WHAT: A supercut demonstrating Gene Wilder's mastery of the comedic pause.

WHO: Filmmaker and video essayist Rishi Kaneria.

WHY WE CARE: By now, most superfans know the story of Gene Wilder coming up with one of the more memorable moments of Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory. It was his decision that his character should totter out to the crowd clutching a cane for his grand entrance, almost fall down, and then glide into a somersault. This little touch reveals the kind of inspiration and perceptiveness that made Wilder such a celebrated comic actor and collaborator. However, it's the 'almost falling down' part of this scene that demonstrates one of the dearly departed performer's under-praised gifts: his mastery of the comedic pause.

There's a reason why the infamous Wonka meme depicts Wilder in repose. The man had a way of filling the silence with emotive anticipation in one direction or another. What probably looked like a mere ellipses in the screenplay, the actor imbued with any combination of flavors from his bottomless rucksack of expressiveness. Video essayist Kaneria, who recently brought us that insightful deep-dive into Paul Thomas Anderson's Radiohead video, brings together seven minutes of Wilder doing more with just a look and silence than some comic actors do with entire films....

What's amazing is just how identifiable famous movie posters can still be even after they've had all of their details stripped away.

Great design is often about the details, but what Film the Blanks also makes clear is that great design is about the the interplay of shapes and colors that make our brains light up even before our eyes can resolve the detail. 

How many can you recognize?...

Favorite beer films of all times. Search by genre, actor, actress and of course beer brands . Feel free to browse all posts and discover hundreds libation related movie scenes that you may not never have known existed.

In case you didn’t notice, Hollywood’s biggest studios are suffering from the same problem as television networks: splintering audiences that require more highly targeted PR and marketing campaigns. A couple of facts: attendance rates for middle-aged consumers are stable while members of the all-important teenage demographic are going to see fewer movies now than they have at any point in the past.

More and more Hollywood communications pros, led by marketing agencies like Capstone Global Marketing, are turning to hard data in order to figure out the best ways to promote their movies. This targeted approach is especially relevant in an era that relies on audience engagement and social media sharing by real-world fans who don’t have any personal investment in the success of individual titles or studios at large....