10 Modern Movie Poster Trends That Need To Die

10. There's Something (Spooky) In My Eye

Our eyes are arguably the most revealing parts of our faces. You could remove a character’s mouth, nose and ears from a shot, and we’d still be able to understand and empathise with whatever emotion they are feeling.

That’s why a common tactic for horror directors is to include a lot of very tight, jarring extreme close-ups on eyes, in order to create a sense of claustrophobia and anxiety. It’s certainly effective, but it’s also overdone, particularly when it comes to movie marketing.

Regularly seen on posters for lower budget, often foreign horror movies, a huge, glaring eyeball is a pretty easy way to tell your audience: “You are about to watch a scary film.” But there’s no design flair or inventiveness on show here – such posters feel like the sort of thing you could cobble together cheaply and efficiently for a media studies school project.

Movies like ‘The Eye’ get a free pass (you could hardly make the poster a big nose), and while the poster designs for both Candyman and Would You Rather? do a good job of making us flinch through the addition of stingers and razor blades, most posters of this kind are completely uninspired.

Avatar is the most puzzling example though. James Cameron’s 3-D extravaganza may be the highest grossing movie of all time, but it’s fair to say it didn’t achieve this based on such a humdrum poster design.