8 More Fiendishly Clever Secrets Hidden In Famous Movie Posters

2. Grave Of The Fireflies

Grave Of The Fireflies movie poster hidden bomber
Toho

Studio Ghibli's Grave Of The Fireflies released all the way back in 1988, but it wasn't until quite recently that a dark secret about its poster was uncovered.

The movie is set during the Second World War, and follows siblings Seita and Setsuko as they seek refuge during the final weeks of the conflict. It's a very grim story: Seita and Setsuko's house is destroyed, Seita is beaten, Setsuko becomes ill, and in general, the bad events never seem to end. Still, there's an undercurrent of hope running through the whole film, despite the saddening note it concludes on.

And the poster seems to embody that hope, showing the siblings laughing while playing with some fireflies. Only, there's more going on here than first meets the eye.

By altering the poster's brightness and contrast settings, a gigantic bomber plane becomes visible at the top of the image. Even worse, it then becomes apparent that those fireflies aren't all fireflies - take a closer look at the ones directly below the plane, and you can see that they're shaped like bullets.

Now, the film is hardly a bundle of laughs, but designing a poster showing two kids getting blown to bits by a huge aircraft is just a little bit sadistic if you ask us.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!