The Thrill of It All, Part 3

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Writers are often encouraged to “show” rather than to “tell,” as if their novels and short stories are motion pictures.

It can't be done, of course, any more than Las Vegas, Nevada (famous for its miniaturized reproductions of such world-famous landmarks as the Egyptian pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and the Statue of Liberty), can reproduce an actual beach (although Mandalay Bay certainly makes an attempt to do so.)

The closest a novelist or a short story writer can come to “showing” action is to describe it in active voice (of course), using action verbs and lots of figures of speech. (Three masters of descriptive writing who come readily to mind, by the way, are the late Ray Bradbury, the late H. G. Wells, and the very-much-alive Frank Peretti. The late William Peter Blatty isn't bad, either, although his descriptions tend to be a bit on the weighty, even rather tangible, side.)

In addition, writers can be, and often are, inspired by movies, just as screenwriters often adapt novelists' books to the big screen or allude to them, more or less directly, in their films. Quentin Tarantino pretty well summed up the state of affairs when he said, “I steal from every movie ever made.” (He meant, of course, that he is inspired by the work of other moviemakers.)

Writers are a bit handicapped, dealing in words, rather than moving images. Nevertheless, a few techniques can help a writer translate other people's ideas, words, and images into the writer's own ideas, words, and images.

Some horror movie posters use red letters to attract viewers' attention. This device works best, perhaps, when the red letters are integral to the movie's plot. Think of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel the Scarlet Letter, Stephen Crane's novel the Red Badge of Courage, or Edgar Allan Poe's short story “The Masque of the Red Death”: posters for any movie version of these literary classics would almost certainly feature red letters in the posters' titles or captions.

One way that writers can accomplish a similar feat is to describe bloody graffiti. Here's an example:

Except for the peeling paint, the long, high wall of the building forming the left side of the narrow alley was featureless and nondescript—well, except for the peeling paint and the ominous word, spelled out in foot-tall, dripping, crimson letters: MURDER.

(Yes, a novel can include red letters, in all caps, bolded and italicized.)

 Some horror movies' titles include effective plays on words. A couple, Shutter and Shutter Island, use a homonym for “shudder,” a word that alludes to a reaction to fear: when one is sufficiently frightened, he or she is apt to tremble, or shudder. Although “shutter” means something quite different than “shudder,” the words sound enough alike that the connotative associations of “shudder” are transmitted to “shutter.”

Obviously, writers can use homonyms and other plays on words in their writing, but they shouldn't overdo it; the “punch” of a play on words comes from its unexpectedness coupled with its curious appropriateness. By overusing wordplay, writers defeat their own purpose.

Here's an example:

The reporter's use of “cereal” instead of “serial,” whether a puerile attempt at wit or an honest mistake that somehow escaped the proofreader's review of the article, was both shocking and ghastly: the report was about a killer who preyed upon children, after all.

The poster promoting Intruder prominently displays severed human body parts. One way that a writer can do the same thing, while avoiding plagiarism, is to describe the parts as realistic-looking props in a novelty shop's display window:

Scattered among the playthings spilled from the children's toy box in the novelty shop's display window were a man's “bloody” severed head and a dismembered forearm bearing a tattoo of a woman's name surrounded by a bloody pink Valentine heart.

Several horror movie posters depict skulls. In a few such posters, the skulls are composed of a variety of smaller images that, together, make up the image of the skull. It would be difficult for a writer to describe such a composite image (and it might take several pages). Instead, the shape, as a whole, could be described, supported by descriptions of only a few of the smaller pictures that make up a couple of the parts of the skull. Perhaps the skull could be a mosaic or a collage:

For the final exam, Jason's art teacher, Ms. Fenway, had assigned her students to create a collage, which had given him the perfect excuse to buy a dozen magazines devoted to horror. Unfortunately, now he had to cut them to pieces, excising pictures that, together, he could assemble so they'd form a giant skull. He'd already glued down the coronal suture, using the stitches from the back of one of Frankenstein's monster's hands. How, he cut out a decapitated head, a loop of intestines, a nest of vipers, and a seductive incubus, dark images all, to form the left ocular orbit; its twin would be made up of a single picture: a jack-o-lantern bearing part of Michael Meyers's face. When the collage was complete, Ms. Fenway would (a) have a heart attack, (b) give him an “A,” (c) suggest his parent hire a psychiatrist, or (d) all of the above.

Pictures similar to those which appear on posters for Halloween, Black Christmas, or other holiday-themed horror movie posters could be described as posters in pop-up stores devoted to particular holiday sales:

Santa looked especially old as he faced off against the demonic snowman. The human head on the Christmas tree was a novel, if rather grotesque, ornament. The blood leading up to the chimney on the snow-covered rooftop suggested that Santa had come to a bad end. The snow globe didn't replicate a blizzard, but a deluge of blood. Thaddeus Gorman smiled, as he set the hammer aside. The posters he'd hung by the chimney with care created a festive, if eerie, air to his pop-up Christmas shop. He was ready, now, for business!

Possibilities are virtually endless, but two things are required:

1. Avoid plagiarism. A horror movie poster can inspire, but it shouldn't be copied, even in words. Instead, let the design, the use of color, the images, the text, and the other elements of the poster suggest similar (or even opposite) ideas. It's the ideas you want. Ideas cannot be copyrighted; specific creations based on ideas can, and usually are, copyrighted.
2. To describe the pictures you have in mind, don't use the same devices as the posters use. Change the ways you use and “display” word pictures. Instead of a poster's use of red letters in a string of text, describe only a single word, written as graffiti on a wall; in place of a poster's display of body parts next to a cash register, describe them as items among a child's toys; rather than employing a poster's exhibition of a skull made up of images (possibly of characters and settings and actions in the movie the poster promotes), show them as pictures cut out of a magazine as material for a collage: pictures similar to those on horror movie posters can be altered and appear as posters in a pop-up Halloween or Christmas shop. Use your own ideas (not the movie posters' or mine, as described here). How? Use your imagination.

There's more to learn from analyzing thriller (and horror) movie posters. We'll do just that in a future Chillers and Thrillers post.

The Thrill of It All, Part 2

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

In Part 1 of “The Thrill of It All,” we analyzed some of the design techniques that movie posters for thrillers use to attract audiences. The techniques that we identified are:

• Make sure that your protagonist stands out from other characters.
• For as long as possible, merely suggest the menace that your main character faces.
• For as long as possible, withhold context: do not explain the cause of the protagonist's dilemma until the end of the story; this ploy keeps your readers guessing and maintains suspense.
• In dialogue or the protagonist's own thoughts, pose a rhetorical question or two (but not too many at once) to introduce or heighten suspense by hunting at the problems your protagonist faces or may face in the future.
• Deliver on the implied promises your use of each of these techniques creates in the minds of your readers.

In Part 2 of this series, we will examine how thriller movie posters use color to appeal to the interests of thriller movie audiences.

Black and dark colors, such as browns, may have symbolic significance that viewers and readers “read” on an a subconscious level, based on associations with such colors that are transmitted culturally, through the arts in general. Black, for example, is often linked to the unknown, to evil, and to death. Like dark colors, black also obscures vision, rendering characters “blind” and reducing them to helplessness. For these reasons, black and dark colors, in general, have taken on an ominous quality. When describing scenes, refer to black and dark colors to create a sense of menace or to obscure your protagonist's sense of sight, as the poster for Thriller (2018) does.

White and light or bright colors, such as yellow and orange, can illuminate darkness, for a few inches or feet, at least, allowing a character to see that which is obscured; at the same time, white or light colors can illuminate the protagonist's face, highlighting him or her, which, of course, can make the main character vulnerable, allowing the villain to locate or attack him or her, so such colors =can both benefit and endanger the main character.

Monochromatic color use can emphasize a protagonist while, at the same time, immersing him or her in the environment, since his or her surroundings are the of a hue that is lighter or darker than the hue in which the protagonist is shown. This technique is used with good effect in the poster for Gothika (2003).

Although this technique might not be used often in novels or other written forms of fiction, it can be the basis of a pertinent descriptive passage when it is warranted. For example, a girl in a green dress may awaken in a pasture, a boy dressed in blue may walk alongside a swimming pool the water in which is reflective of a blue sky, or a man or a woman in red may enter a red room. Usually, such scenes would be reserved for significant, stand-alone scenes or short stories. Edgar Allan Poe uses this technique to great effect in his masterful short story “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842).

The Regression (2016) poster combines the use of black and gray with the use of red. The latter color appears only in one place in the poster's image, in the form of a fiery inverted cross that burns along the junctures of a barn's hayloft doors. (The color also appears once in the text at the bottom of the poster, advising viewers that the picture will play in theaters in December.) An inverted cross represents evil, since it literally turns the Christian sign of Jesus's sacrificial death upside-down. (In occult lore, an inverted sign supposedly cancels out the power represented by the sign). The fact that the cross is afire also suggests its destruction, but this image may also imply the passion with which this destruction occurs—the passion, in other words, of the unseen foe.

On the literal level, the black and gray represent night; symbolically, they might also suggest evil. The judicious use of color can accomplish as much in a novel's description as it does in the imagery used in the Regression poster.

The poster for The Night Listener (2006) uses black, white, and blue to guide the viewer's eye downward and to the right. The left side of the poster shows a a line of dark trees in silhouette. The right side of the poster shows a large image of Ganriel Noone (Robin Williams) and Donna Logand (Toni Colletee) standing side by side. The treeline on the left and the couple on the right frame the white and blue colors which, together, form hazy light, perhaps the result of a full moon shining through fog.

The wedge-shaped light funnels the viewer's vision down and to the right, past Noone and Logand, to a much smaller image of Noone, standing alone in the middle of what looks like a forest trail or road. Bright white light appears at his sides and begind him. Although the source of the light is unseen, its placement seems to suggest that the illumination radiates from Noone himself. Deliberate placement of objects and color can create symbolic effects like the ones in this poster.

As we have seen, color, as it is used in movie posters, often has a symbolic significance. In the movie poster for the thriller Bardo Blues (2019), blue is the primary color. The face of the protagonist, Jack, a mentally ill young man (Stephen McClintik), is shown amid an inkblot formed by dark purple against a variety of blue tones that create a shimmering effect.

The title of the film, Bardo Blues, references depression (colloquially known as “the blues”), suggesting that the man depicted on the poster suffers from clinical is depression. The inkblot shape implies that he is mentally ill, since inkblots were once commonly used in the controversial Rorschach test designed to uncover thought disorder. The shimmering effect of the blue tones that form the poster's background suggest confusion or instability, complementing the inklblot shape's suggestion that the protagonist is in some way mentally unstable.

Colors are used in many other ways, for a variety of additional purposes. Study other posters' uses of color to discover how you can use color in your own writing to achieve similar effects as those that the posters employ.

A couple of caveats are in order, before this post concludes.

First, the posters are ads, not stories. As such, they are designed to sell the products, the films they promote, not to present a drama that enacts a well-plotted story. Therefore, posters often do not correspond to the dramas they promote or have only a slight correspondence to the films' plots.

 

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) summary for Thriller reads: “A childhood prank comes back to haunt a clique of South Central Los Angeles teens when their victim returns home during their high-school Homecoming weekend.” The poster doesn't seem to have much to do with a “childhood prank,” with “a clique,” with “South Central Los Angeles teens,” or with a “high-school Homecoming weekend.”

IMDb summarizes Regression as involving the attempt by “a detective and a psychoanalyst [to] uncover evidence of a satanic cult while investigating a young woman's terrifying past.” The only indication of satanism as an element of the plot is the inverted fiery cross, and there is no hint of a police investiagtion, a psychoanalyst's involvement, or the young woman's “terrifying past.”

The poster for The Night Listener seems to have even less connection to the film it promotes. IMDb summarizes its plot: “In the midst of his crumbling relationship, a radio show host begins speaking to his biggest fan, a young boy, via the telephone. But when questions about the boy's identity come up, the host's life is thrown into chaos.” The poster shows no indication of the male figure's profession or “relationship,” does not refer to a “young boy,” and shows no “chaos.”

A more detailed summary of the movie's plot suggests that the poster is based on one scene, the pertinent sentence of which is, “Donna collapses in the middle of a road and tries to hold him [Noone] with her in the path of an oncoming truck.” Although the poster shows Noone in the road, a source of light behind him, Donna is not in the road with him; she is not hold him down, and there is not indication of a ruck, other than the light behind Noone, which is, apparently, produced by the truck's headlights.

Again, it must be remembered that the posters are intended to sell the movies, not to faithfully portray their plots or any details of the story (other than, perhaps, the appearance of the characters).

Second, as an integral part of a written work's story, description, wherein the visual techniques we are discussing—composition, imagery, color, symbolism—appear, must be a vital part of the narrative; it must be part of the story itself, not something that has no intrinsic significance. Description must be part of the product, not merely a sales pitch separate and largely unrelated to the action of the story.

How can a writer use the techniques that movie posters use to appeal to their audience's interests? We will take a look at some of these techniques in the last post of this series.

For now, let's sum up what we have learned about the techniques of color use:

• Color can convey symbolic meanings.
• Color can suggest emotional effects.
• Color can conceal, reveal, or highlight (or produce any combination of these effects).
• Color can emphasize a character's relationship to his or her environment while, at the same time, associating him or her with his or her surroundings.
• The study of other movie posters will show how color is used to accomplish a variety of other purposes and effects.
• In descriptions, color use must be an integral part of the story, not something used without narrative purpose.

There's more to learn from analyzing thriller movie posters. We'll do just that in a future Chillers and Thrillers post.

The Thrill of It All, Part 1

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

Movie posters are ads, of course; they are designed to sell movie tickets. As such, writers can learn from these posters what their designers believe the movie's targeted audience is interested in. In other words, movie posters allow writers access to free audience analysis research (or, at the very least, expert speculation) on the part of industry insiders as to what prompts moviegoers to go to the sort of movies the posters promote.

Chillers and Thrillers has already analyzed several horror movie posters (and may do so again), but, in this post, we take a look at posters for movies that are sold as thrillers.

Although some thriller movie posters appeal to a few of the same elements as horror movies typically feature, thriller posters stress different focal points than many horror movie posters emphasize.

For example, thriller movie posters frequently highlight the protagonist and his or her dilemma. The size of the main character—often just his or her face (i. e., head)—is not to scale, to say the least: it is gigantic in comparison to the rest of the imagery; as such, the face stands out from the rest of the images. On the poster for Shutter Island, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo diCaprio) is represented by a gigantic face frowning out of the darkness; he is many times larger than the island facility shown below him, in a dark sea.

The protagonist is also emphasized over any other figures that are present (although, often, the main character is the only figure shown on the poster). On the poster for Law Abiding Citizen, the face of protagonist Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) face is larger than the body of the villain, Clyde Alexander Shelton (Gerald Butler).

There is also a suggestion of menace; the threat or danger, however, is often unseen. It is suggested by the imagery, including the protagonist's facial expression; the colors; and the caption, if any.

The plight of the protagonist is indicated in various ways. First, he or she is frequently alone, which means that the main character is unaided. The protagonist must fend for him- or herself, must gather intelligence, must formulate a battle or an escape plan, must administer first aid to him- or herself, must fight alone.

The very fact that the menace, if shown at all, is usually a dark, shadowy figure, perhaps hooded, and frequently armed, also suggests the protagonist's predicament: he or she is up against an unknown foe. It is difficult enough to fight against an opponent whose strengths and weaknesses one knows; it is much more difficult to combat a totally unknown foe.

Not only is the face of Jessica Allain (Lisa Walker) shown as huge in comparison with the poster's other images, but the shadowy figure who menaces her also wears a hood and gloves.

Thriller posters deprive viewers of a context, rendering the protagonists' situation mysterious. We don't know how the main character got into the present situation, and we have no idea how he or she will get out of the dilemma. To sharpen the protagonist's quandary, the poster's caption might pose a question, as the poster for Law Abiding Citizen does: “How do you stop a killer who is already behind bars?”

A poster may pinpoint the relationship that brings the protagonist face to face with his or her adversary, as Cold Comes the Night does: “She found a fortune. He found a target.”

Let's wrap up this post by listing the design features we've seen on the posters we've discussed:

• Make sure that your protagonist stands out from other characters.
• For as long as possible, merely suggest the menace that your main character faces.
• For as long as possible, withhold context: do not explain the cause of the protagonist's dilemma until the end of the story; this ploy keeps your readers guessing and maintains suspense.
• In dialogue or the protagonist's own thoughts, pose a rhetorical question or two (but not too many at once) to introduce or heighten suspense by hunting at the problems your protagonist faces or may face in the future.
• Deliver on the implied promises your use of each of these techniques creates in the minds of your readers.

There are exceptions to these general techniques, but there is also a reason that these methods have are general. Designers have found them to be effective; they work. They are adept at enticing audiences to buy tickets. They sell the work they promote. As such, incorporating them into the action of the thriller that you are writing can keep readers reading your stories and coming back for more.

There's more to learn from analyzing thriller movie posters. We'll do just that in a future Chillers and Thrillers post.