Telling Images: Horror Movie Poster Tropes

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Although they are not to everyone's taste, perhaps, horror movie posters are works of art.

To promote their films, such posters use a variety of visual and linguistic techniques. The latter often include the movie's title, a caption, a pun or another type of play on words, an allusion, a symbol, or a metaphor. The former exclude almost nothing.

Today's post focuses on horror movie posters' use of body parts. Specifically, we're concerned with eyes, mouths, breasts, buttocks, hands, and female genitals. (Ears, noses, feet, and phalli don't appear to play much, if any, part in horror movie poster art.)

Perhaps, in a future post, we'll consider heads (decapitated, of course), arms and legs (dismembered, naturally), and internal organs (eviscerated, obviously).

Let's start at the top and work our way down.

The Eyes Have It

Eyes are featured in quite a few horror movie posters.

Such posters feature wide eyes suggestive of shock or terror; reptilian eyes with slit pupils (Beneath Loch Ness); the whites of eyes, sans irises (The Return); and an eye in which fire (and a fiery cross) burns (The Visitation).

In some such posters, eyes are replaced with such substitutes as screaming mouths (One Missed Call), hands (Oculus), and treetops (Cabin Fever).

Live creatures or objects exit some eyes: a hand (The Eye) and blood (The Eye). In other images, something enters the eye or is about to do so: the edge of a single-edge razor blade (Would You Rather?) and a yellow jacket (Candyman).

Eyes are displaced (relocated) to incongruous sites in still other horror movie posters (one peeks out between the lips of a mouth in the poster for The Theater Bizarre, or are equipped with the body parts of another species (a gigantic eye becomes a tentacled monster in the poster promoting The Crawling Eye).

As mirrors, eyes reflect the threat or a victim that a character (perhaps him- or herself a potential victim) sees, thus allowing the audience a glimpse at the menace as well: Hipnoz, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Eye, The Skeleton Key.

Five-pointed stars, or pentagrams, are carved into the case of a victim in the Starry Eyes movie poster—right over her eyes.

There are as many ways to include images of eyes in horror movie posters as there are ways to imagine such use, but such devices as spotlighting, substitution, the egress and ingress of foreign objects, displacement, reflection, and mutilation are certainly some of the horrific techniques that make the eyes emblems of fear, especially in movies that feature body horror.

Getting Mouthy

A straight-jacketed corpse is shows inside a screaming mouth (In the Mouth of Madness). Bestial lips frame drooling teeth and fangs in The Funhouse movie poster. At the end of a bent wrist, a hand claws its way through a gaping mouth in the poster for The Possession. A girl's mouth is missing in Silent Hill's poster, and a woman's mouth is obstructed by a locked metal band in another of Silent Scream's posters.

Like eyes, which provide the capability of sight, mouths are useful to our survival. They help us to eat and to communicate; they also allow us to sound the alarm, to scream—unless they are missing or muffled with a gag.

Keeping Abreast of Things

Most horror movie posters eschew nudity. Instead, breasts, buttocks, and genitals are partially revealed (and, thus, partially concealed). Nevertheless, an emphasis on them, whether as a result of partial nudity or otherwise, makes them the center of attention in the poster and in the viewers' perceptions.

Bikinis are revealing, and their brief tops expose quite a bit of cleavage in Blood Night's poster—so much so that viewers, especially males, might not see the hatchet in her right hand and the decapitated man's head that she holds by its hair in her right hand as she trudges through a forest of leafless trees.

A rare pair of bare breasts do appear in the poster for Hostel II''s poster, but they aren't enough to deflect attention from the decapitated head the topless woman holds, which is, perhaps, her own: she is not shown above the neck.

The Machete Kills poster displays one of the more creative uses of breasts. The woman it features (actress Sophia Vergara as Desdemona) has twin machine guns strapped to her chest, the domes from which the firing barrels protrude covering her breasts.

A number of other horror movie posters feature breasts. Apart from those in the Machete Kills poster, though, most of these particular body parts, ironically enough, seem to have the purpose of either attracting attention to themselves or of deflecting attention away from something or someone else b, well, drawing attention to themselves.

Bottoms Up

Sexologist Alfred Kinsey suggests that women's buttocks, not their beasts, are mainly what attract the male of the species, and some social scientists claim that men's obsession with breasts stems from the resemblance of breasts to buttocks. Be that as it may, more horror movie posters seem to feature breasts than buttocks.

Still, such posters do present posteriors as well. The poster for Peelers, which shows a woman in high heels and thong panties lying on her right side, facing forward, away from the viewer, is an example. So arresting is the image that many might not see her severed leg hanging from the pole she was apparently dancing around (or hanging from) before she lost her gam. If so, it would seem that the buttocks, in this poster, serves the same purpose that the bare breasts exhibited in the Hostel II poster fulfills, diverting viewers' attention from the horrific image of the severed leg by focusing their attention, initially, at least, on the erotic image of the woman's naked bottom.

Burlesque Massacre's poster shows a woman from the rear. She wears a black thong and black high heels. Her legs are spread. Her left hand rests upon her left hip. Her left hand is on her right hip, but, while the thumb and fingers of her left hand hold her left hip, her right hand lies along her right hip, its fingers curled around the handle of the bloody sword she holds. Like the figure in Peelers, this woman is also an erotic dancer. Although no pole is shown, the caption makes her vocation clear: “Dance. Strip. Die.”

In general, bare buttocks seem to accomplish the same tasks as bare or partially bare breasts, either diverting attention away from something or someone else or focusing attention on themselves. By being presented first with the erotic and then with the horrific, the latter is enhanced, seeming all the more horrid than it might have appeared had it not been preceded by images associated with lust, rather than with horror.

Hands Down

The fingers of a gigantic hand curl toward the silhouette of a male figure standing on its palm (The Hand). A man stares at his raised hands, the fingers of which curl inward (The Hands of Orlac). A hand reaches out from the soil of a grave marked with a headstone bearing a word of advice to the viewer: “Before you are covered with the last shovelful of dirt . . . Be sure you are really dead” (Mortuary). Hands growing out of a woman's face replace the eyes they would have covered, were they not already gone (Oculus). A zombie approaches the viewer, right hand raised and ready; right hand extended, as if to seize a victim—the viewer him- or herself.

The hand or hands appear in plenty of other horror movie posters, too, but most of them are variations of the images cited, suggesting menace or escape—or an escaping menace.

Private Parts

Posters for Teeth, a comedy-horror movie featuring a young woman with a vagina dentata (a vagina with teeth—and sharp ones, at that) never show the female sexual organ itself—this seems taboo even for the horror genre, but, instead, suggests the vagina various creative ways, through the use of symbolic cover-ups.

One poster shows an X-ray photograph of a human torso. Located where the patient's sex would be are the two letters, mirror images of “E,” the horizontal bars of which end in sharp points, resembling fangs. Together, the facing letters are supposed to represent the vagina and its teeth.

In another poster for this film, a woman lies supine in a bathtub, her legs parted. Rose petals float on the sudsy water. Below the surface, in swirling, blood-red water, a rose is shown from above, the white thorns among its soft petals suggesting the teeth with which the rose (symbolizing the vagina) is armed.

A third poster for this movie shows a young woman standing, her left leg turned in against her right leg. She wears a yellow short with orange bands around its neck and the ends of its short sleeves. The short bears a message: “WARNING: Sex changes everything.” Wide-eyes, lower lip askew, she stares at the viewer, as if shocked. Her pubic lower abdomen, pubic area, and upper thighs are covered with a scalloped-edge circle identifying the film's producer.

Much as the fig leaf has come to represent the censorship of phalli in painting and sculpture, the letters, the rose, and a scallop-edge circle fulfill the same function in these posters. However, by concealing the vagina, these cover ups also tend to focus viewers' attention on the very private part they conceal.

In analyzing what additional meanings eyes, mouths, breasts, buttocks, hands, and female genitals may have, it is necessary to investigate, identify, and evaluate the cultural significance of such body parts. To start, a dream dictionary might impart some suggestions. For example, concerning the mouth's symbolic significance, according to one source,

Your mouth is a fundamental part of life. It takes things in such as food, pleasure or even pain. Basically the mouth is a pleasure area, but it is also the way you express pleasure or pain, as with smiling, crying or grimacing. So the mouth is a way you communicate as well as satisfy yourself or gain your needs.  As an organ of expression the mouth can also give thanks for life and utters beauty in words or sounds. This is a way you can uplift the dark things in you and transform them.

Body Horror and the Ghost in the Machine

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In a nutshell, metaphysical dualism is the belief that the mind and the body are distinct from one another. The former is physical; the latter is not. However, in some mysterious manner, they interact. The French philosopher Rene Descartes, a dualist, expressed the mind's imprisonment, as it were, inside a body of flesh and blood as “the ghost in the machine”—The Ghost in the Machine: what a fantastic horror story title that would make!

It's not difficult to see why Descartes would describe the plight of the mind in such a fashion. The center of consciousness, or awareness and self-awareness (the awareness of the self as a self), of memory, and of will, among other aspects of intelligence, the mind controls the body, but only partially. The mind is also a prisoner of the body, which goes through changes during puberty, middle age, and old age that the mind does not experience, or at least not in the same ways and to the same extent. Thus, adolescent boys are embarrassed by their “changing” voices, girls are concerned about the development of their breasts and the onset of menstruation, middle-aged men and women sometimes undergo a “mid-life crisis,” and the elderly say they're “young at heart,” despite their balding pates, wrinkled faces, and flagging strength and stamina. The body limits the mind in many other ways as well, demanding food and drink, sleep and rest, medical care and equilibrium.

The body is also constrained and controlled to some degree by the mind, which can push it to the limits of its endurance, compel it to attempt feats both unwise and dangerous, and entertain thoughts and memories that cause stress or depression.

Metaphysical dualism, whether it is true or not (no one seems to know for certain), is the basis for the horror subgenre known as “body horror.” In body horror fiction, the changes the human body undergoes are much more extreme than those of puberty or aging; they're also horrific, often involving deviant sex, violence, injury, deformity, or death. They remind us that, as Descartes suggests, our conscious selves, our minds, are, indeed, imprisoned within our bodies. As Edgar Allan Poe observes, horror fiction is about exaggeration, sensationalism, luridness. Fans of horror fiction (and of other popular genres) want not just the ordinary, but the extraordinary—indeed, the paranormal or the supernatural, if they can get it; in short, the public wants:

The ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought into the strange and mystical. . . . To be appreciated, you must be read, and these things are invariably sought after with avidity.

Such grotesque exaggeration is typical of body horror no less than it is of any other type of popular fiction. The body in which the mind is trapped frequently experiences deviant sex, violence, injury, deformity, or death of the most horrific kinds, as these examples attest:

Bentley Little's novels. As we observe in “Bentley Little: Aberrant Sex as Symbolic of the Nature of Sin,” this author frequently describes scenes of deviant sex acts, not only to titillate his readers, but also to suggest that such behavior “is a shorthand way of suggesting the sinfulness and impiety of modern humanity.” Since we've already examined Little's use of sadistic and other deviant forms of sex in this previous post, there's no need to revisit it in detail in this essay. Those interested in the discussion need only access the link (above).

Slasher movies and splatter films. Violence and injury are staples of most horror fiction, but they are especially prevalent in such slasher flicks as I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Scream (1996), and Halloween (1978), to name but a few, and in splatter films, such as Dawn of the Dead (1978), I Spit on Your Grave (1978), Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Hostel (2005), Turistas (2006), Saw (2004), and many others. In many splatter films, the violence is so extreme and so gratuitous that this subgenre is also known as “torture porn.” Even these movies, though, don't deliver the shock and horror of the exploding head in Scanners (1981).

The mutant cannibals of The Hills Have Eyes (1977; sequel, 1995), the Phantom in the silent film The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Dr. Phibes (The Abominable Dr. Phibes [1971]), Belial (Basket Case [1982]), Freddy Krueger (the Nightmare on Elm Street series [1984-2010] [so far]), and Seth Brundle (The Fly [1986]) are among the most grotesque and, in some cases, to some extent, the most pitiable deformed characters in horror movies.

Death is so ubiquitous in horror movies that a list of the movies in which it appears is probably unnecessary, but films in which the causes of death are among the most horrific include Elvira Parker's smashed head (Deadly Friend [1986]) (although it does look less than realistic) and, again, it's hard to top the exploding head in Scanners (1981). A runner-up might be the death inflicted by the otherworldly embryonic “chest-buster” in Alien (1979).

Movies are good at showing the blood, guts, and gore associated with body horror, but they can't compare with the printed word, because body horror is not as much about blood, guts, and gore as it is the suffering that goes on in the mind. Body horror is more about the mental anguish that we suffer as minds trapped inside the prisons of our flesh. It is in the mind, not the body, that horror, terror, and disgust occur. These emotions are the effects of these afflictions, but, in body horror, the effects count more than their causes. That's the reason that a master of horror such as Poe can cause mental anguish—more horror and terror and disgust—in a short story such as “The Premature Burial,” which takes place inside the coffin of a man who's been buried alive, than even the best horror movie producer can create. Poe has the power of the written word, the medium of cognition, at his command; the director must rely on nothing more than pictures and sounds. The body, without the mind, is only an object. A corpse has no fear of the dentist—or of the psychotic serial killer. It is only when the mind and the body are alive and the mind is trapped inside the body, a “ghost in the machine,” that the dentist's drill or the serial killer's knife is a thing of terror beyond imagining.

H. R. Giger: A New Approach to Horror Fiction?

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

H. R. Giger's biomechanical art combines the organic with the mechanical, human bodies with machines, biology with technology. Typically, his bodies are female. Dehumanized, they lack consciousness; sometimes, they appear to be catatonic or even dead. Were they analyzed according to Martin Buber's categorization of relationships, the female figures in Giger's art would be involved in—not participating in, but involved in—an “I-it,” as opposed to an “I-thou,” relationship. In Giger's art, women are not flesh-and-blood creatures, or not entirely; rather, they are biomechnical hybrids, more dead than alive, and they are more subsumed by the mechanical than the mechanical is subsumed in them.

Often, the female figures' involvement in these associations with mechanical systems is compelled, rather than voluntary; the females are restrained, held in place by mechanical arms, pipes, vises, form-fitting chairs, needles, or masks. They appear to be nothing more than human hosts to industrial parasites or to a system comprised of interacting mechanical parts. Often, their eyes are closed or completely white, lacking both irises and pupils. It is as if their humanity has been extracted along with whatever the needles, tubes, pipes, coils, clamps, suction hoses, hydraulic devices, cables, pumps, phallic appendages, beakers, and baths extract from their mouths and other, more intimate, bodily orifices. Giger's paintings are impersonal, detached, disinterested, and, in this sense, inhuman, depicting scenes that involve actions resembling rape, although it is questionable whether the machinery of technology can commit such an offense in any real sense of the word.

Of course, someone had to create these fantastic hybrid female-machines. The existence of biomechanical factories dedicated to exploiting human females implies that other human beings, perhaps men, since their sex is almost completely absent in Giger's work, designed and operate this system for their own benefit, albeit for mysterious purposes. If men are in charge of the system, if they have converted the females of the species largely into a power supply or an exploitable resource of some kind—chemical, perhaps, or sexual—they must be inhuman; they must be monstrous, indeed, to have deprived women of their lives, of their liberty, of their pursuit of happiness—and, indeed, of their very humanity itself. One would not be surprised to find someone like Josef Mengele in charge of the sadistic, clandestine, mechanized operations.

Each painting depicts a nightmare world unto itself, disconnected from any other. Each of the paintings suggests a narrative, but none connects to any other, and none explains the situations it depicts. It is as if each one is the start of a tale which begins in media res, but never progresses beyond its beginning. Therefore, each scene is without context and without meaning, an existential nightmare devoid of significance from which, like Jean-Pal Sartre's No Exit, there is no escape. Perhaps this is Giger's vision of modern life, a world in which men operate a vast system of machinery, preying upon helpless, dehumanized females like parasites feeding upon hosts, for purposes unspecified, but likely involving, at the very least, sex and exploitation.

Most of Giger's work is unique, in a class of its own, but a few pieces, those he designed for various film projects, do have a context, although not one created exclusively, or even primarily, by Giger himself. However, he often expressed his enjoyment of the movies' scripts. His comments on some of his work on specific motion picture projects may suggest insights concerning his overall intentions as an artist. 

Giger was commissioned to create some potential designs for the movie Dune, including Harkonnen, a castle symbolizing “intemperance, exploitation, aggression, and brutality”—all elements commonly featured in his work. The castle is equipped with a “drawbridge which can be lowered like an enormous penis to admit visitors,” Giger explained. (Many of Giger's paintings also include phalli, most of which are mechanical, rather than organic.) His castle “is a gigantic Moloch, which functions by converting living beings into energy. Every visitor is materially or spiritually exploited.”

In describing the castle, Giger could be describing almost any of his own paintings:

Whoever enters the castle stays there for the rest of his life, which in any case can only last a few seconds. The belly of Harkonnen is a gigantic, senseless Gothic, empty space in which corpulent beings swing through the abyss on their suspensors. The thin, plump external skin is supported from inside by a bone-like structure in the form of gigantic vertical plates. The egg in the desert, a symbol of fertility and reclusion—nothing but a fragile, empty sham.

Although his contributions were not used in the film, the fact that Giger had “a completely free hand” in designing Harkonnen suggests that, in developing the castle's designs, he may have used the same ideas and themes he'd expressed in his other work. If so, in Giger's comments about the work he did for various movies, we may have an insight into some of the views the artist sought to express through his own biomechanical paintings. 

Giger designed aliens for the Alien film series, Species's Sil and Ghost Train, the Batmobile for Batman Forever, art for the poster promoting Future-Kill, creatures for Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis, and murals and other work for Prometheus. He also served as a creative consultant for set designs for Killer Condom. We'll consider those works which pertain to our own interest, the new approach for horror fiction that may be represented in Giger's work.

Batmoble Art describes Giger's Batmobile as an “'X'[-]shaped design” that included “articulated front legs/mandibles, retractable fins, and Gatling gun emplacements on each of the four pods on the sides of the vehicle,” noting that Giger's “design also combined side and forward intake ports with organic spines and a central pod connecting the four legs.” 

The result looks more like a living organism than a vehicle and, apparently, it was considered too avant-garde for the Caped Crusader, despite Batman's own penchant for the grotesque. It does indicate, though, that, for Giger, with regard to objects that have a definite, definable purpose, function determines form, where design is concerned.

Angela Cartwright, who plays the navigator of the Nostromo in Alien, describes the set that Giger created as the spaceship's interior as “visceral” and “erotic”: “it's big vaginas and penises . . . the whole thing is like you're going inside of some sort of womb.” Such a description could be applied to many of the backgrounds and settings of Giger's own paintings, Penis Landscape in particular. 

According to David Edelstein,

Alien remains the key text in the “body horror” subgenre . . . and Giger’s designs covered all possible avenues of anxiety. Men traveled through vulva-like openings, got forcibly impregnated, and died giving birth to rampaging gooey vaginas dentate . . . . This was truly what David Cronenberg would call “the new flesh,” a dissolution of the boundaries between man and machine, machine and alien, and man and alien, with a psychosexual invasiveness. [One might add that the film also dissolves the divide between male and female, since male characters are impregnated and give birth.]

Another of Giger's works, the so-called space jockey, was included to depict the dead alien pilot of a spaceship that enabled its crew to drop his species' eggs onto a planet whose life the parasitic hatchlings could then use as their hosts.

In designing the alien “facehugger,” Giger ultimately decided “on a small creature with humanlike fingers and a long tail.” He may have had its means of locomotion and its sexuality in mind. The alien assumes this form during “the second stage” of its “life cycle,” using its eight legs to “crawl rapidly” and its tail to assist it in “making great leaps.” Its legs and tail also help the facehugger to “hug” its victim's face: it grips the host's head with its legs and wraps its tail around the victim's neck. Once it has done so, the creature “administers a cynose-based paralytic,” which causes the victim to lose consciousness and the ability to move. The creature is also equipped with a tubular proboscis, which it introduces into its human host's mouth and esophagus to implant its embryo—reproduction by oral (and nasal), rather than genital means. It seems that, for Giger and the others who designed the facehugger, the creature's function determined its form.

For Sil, the female alien in Species, Giger was interested in maintaining her beauty while portraying her as deadly. She would change colors as she transformed into an assassin, and she would use her barbed tongue to kill her victims:

The character is to go through four distinct stages of evolution [Giger explains:] “She's looking for good-looking, healthy men to breed her race on Earth. If her lover's not healthy, she sees a green aura around him. When she gets angry she first becomes dark red, then orange-red hot. Her clothes and hair burn off and on her back there are these sharp spikes coming out. Her body weapons are like red glowing steel. Then she cools to transparent carbonized glass and you see her inside bone construction: veins, body organs and discs.” It is at this stage when her killing cycle begins and she loses her transparency.

Giger also wanted Sil to have a tongue “composed of barbed hooks. Sil would kiss her lovers, forcing her tongue into the victim's mouth and down their throats, then yank the insides out.” Instead of using her proboscis to impregnate men, Sil would use her tongue to disembowel them. This idea, like the idea of having Sil change colors, was rejected.

While it seems that, during collaboration with others, Giger considers carefully the effects he wants to create, allowing the forms of his designs to follow the functions of the films' fantastic characters, it may be that he is guided more by intuition than by intention. Since nearly all of his paintings and drawings have similar qualities and express similar themes and emotions, Giger may operate from an unconscious template in which bondage, masochism, sadism, and the “intemperance, exploitation, aggression, and brutality” his Harkonnen castle embodies provide a palette for creating the forms that allow various characters to accomplish the tasks assigned them by a particular movie's script.

Indeed, in creating his own paintings, Giger appears to rely largely on intuition, with no preconceived notions about function or purpose, although current events and fads may, like his own dreams, play a role:

I just start from one side and go to the other. I paint whatever comes to my mind. There is no pre-planning. For instance, the ones that feature penis imagery and grotesque baby heads, I just felt like doing that. People have said that I look like these babies a little bit. At the time, 1973, there was a problem with oil and gas—the energy crisis. You can see burners in some of my paintings. The other images must also have some reason behind them. Condoms, of course are very “in” now.

He has also admitted to having been inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon, a fictional book of spells and magic, and Lovecraft's cosmicism, the view “that there is no recognizable divine presence, such as God, in the universe, and that humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence.” 

Giger, who died in 2014, left quite a legacy in his works of art, which include his remarkable, disturbing, and fascinating drawings, paintings, and sculptures, as well as in his style, which mixes the fantastic with such concepts as Lovecraft's cosmicism and the existential angst of Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other existential philosophers. However, his work also suggests a new approach to horror fiction that could breathe new life into a genre that has, of late, become predictable and stale.


Too often, horror is about acquiring new knowledge about a bizarre anomaly or singularity, often of an origin that is otherworldly (Alien), paranormal (Paranormal Activity), supernatural (The Exorcist), or abnormal (Psycho). For most of such movies, the strange is emphasized, but, once characters learn, through discovery, education, or revelation, the nature of the beast, the alien, ghost, demon, or madman (or woman) is neutralized or eliminated, and all's well again with the world. Since the 1950s, this approach has worked well in horror, as it has in science fiction, but, after well over half a century, this plot has become more than a little threadbare.

Giger's art offers a new approach, one in which there is no discovery to be made, in which education cannot provide answers, in which revelation is not forthcoming. Every story is a story in progress, so there is only what is happening now. There is no context, so everything is a mystery, which means there is no certainty, no security, and, quite possibly, no safety, and, certainly, no meaning. Characters may act by reason or faith or out of compassion, guilt, fear, or a desire for vengeance. They may act blindly. At times, they may triumph, but over what will remain unknown, and reason, faith, love, or other motivators may just as easily fail as succeed.

Giger's worlds are dark, mysterious, dangerous, disturbing, strangely erotic, meaningless, and compelling. They are worlds in which anything may happen and the only certainty is that there is no certainty. Such worlds may be mad. They may be pictures of hell. They are full of exploitation, violence, existential absurdity, hopelessness, helplessness, and terror—just like “real life” itself. Nihilistic worlds, they are devoid of heroes. They are worlds in which unseen, monstrous managers rule, unseen and unknown, faceless, nameless, and inhuman.

They are perfect settings, in other words, for horror fiction, whether written or performed.