10 Creepiest Horror Movie Posters Of All Time

7. Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things

Pulse Poster
VCI Entertainment

Bob Clark’s 1972 cult horror intrigues from the attention-grabbing title alone. A sadistic theatre director takes his theatre troupe (his “children") to an island, which primarily serves as a graveyard for the criminally insane. As part of his twisted games the director raises the dead with disastrous results for all. The film airs more on the side of comedy, though the poster is outright creepy.

It is the most cartoonish of those listed, however, it enables the artist to push the subject matter to a very dark place.

Centre of the poster is the corpse of Orville Dunworth, the film’s primary antagonist zombie. Propped up inside a coffin as rancid as he is, Orville’s yellowing flesh barely clings to his skeleton. The one eye still in his skull gives a look of despair.

One of the men who accompanies the corpse bears more than a passing resemblance to Charles Manson. He poses with a hand gestured towards the corpse like a profane parody of tourist photographs.

However, it is the man in the background who adds the most additional creepiness to the corpse displaying scene. The childlike propeller beanie and red balloon are jarring with the heavy brow and sneering face of the man.

Contributor

An English Lit. MA Grad trying to validate my student debt by writing literary fiction and alternative non-fiction.