Wednesday, 14 September 2011

Comparison of 'The Last Exorcism' and 'Dead Silence' Posters - 14/09/2011




Although these two posters are from the same horror film genre, they represent their film in several different ways. The poster for The Last Exorcism makes the dreadful mistake of not giving any indication of when the film will be released - Dead Silence at least puts "COMING SOON" on their poster, and people may forget about The Last Exorcism if they have no clue as to when or whether it has already been in the cinema. Dead Silence further conveys its well known producers/directors by writing "FROM THE WRITERS AND DIRECTORS AND PRODUCERS OF SAW" - 'Saw' being an iconic gore/horror film will be instantly recognisable to the audience, and will make them more interested in Dead Silence. However, The Last Exorcism poster just enlarges the name of well-known horror producers "ELI ROTH & STRIKE", and not everyone will know who these producers are - the poster should have given an example of one of the films Roth produced, such as 'Hostel'. The Last Exorcism poster is more sparse in information than the Dead Silence one - Dead Silence includes a whole cast/production billing block at the bottom which takes up a majority of the poster. But I feel that this unnecessarily wastes valuable poster space and becomes lost and insignificant to the audience. Furthermore, both posters give an indication as to what rating their film will be (Dead Silence being rated 'R' and The Last Exorcism 'TBC' or 'To Be Confirmed'), but you can pretty much guess the rating of the film just by the imagery shown on the posters. Both posters are also similar in the fact that they include a website address for their movie to advertise their film further and give the audience a chance to find out more about the plot of the film.

Personally, I believe that the imagery in The Last Exorcism poster stands out more in comparison to the Dead Silence poster due to its more unique and disturbing imagery, and will be more memorable afterwards than Dead Silence. However, Dead Silence does give more information and enticing textual features than The Last Exorcism, and thus may exceed in bringing in a wider cinematic audience.

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