Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman
I'm browsing horror movie
posters again. This time, I'm checking out erotic horror movie
posters. There are strong parallels between erotica and horror, after
all, so movie posters that advertise a cross between the two are apt
to be doubly erotic or horrific or both. That, at least, is my
hypothesis.
But I'm also looking for
originality, so if there are more than a couple erotic movie posters
concerning the same theme—vampires, werewolves, or witches, say—I
eliminate those based on this theme. Thus, the poster for Vampire
Lesbos, which features a
beautiful, topless brunette vampire drinking what appears to be a
wineglass of blood, as her largely unseen lover embraces her from
behind, ends up, as it were, on the cutting-room floor; so does An
Erotic Werewolf in London, whose
fanged female rips away her own blouse as she begins to undergo her
transformation from woman into wolf.
One
of the posters that remain is that for the movie Cadaver.
The poster shows a nude female body being sliced, or mutilated, by a
scalpel in the gloved hand of someone (presumably, a medical
examiner). The surgical knife, instead of making the “Y” incision
characteristic of autopsies, cuts through the front of the woman's
right breast and down the same side of her abdomen.
Blood,
rising from the wound, suggests she isn't dead, after all, because,
of course, cadavers don't bleed. She's a victim, it seems, rather
than a dead body.
Her
ordeal begs the question, Why is she being treated in this manner? Is
she being tortured? Did the medical examiner (if he is a medical
examiner) mistake a condition or conditions which may mimic
death—catatonia, perhaps, coupled with paralysis—for her apparent
absence of life? The text, which frequently unlocks the implications
of the images on movie posters is, this time, of no help: “The
anatomy of evil, the pathology of curse.” The film itself provides
an explanation for the bleeding body that potential moviegoers aren't
apt to guess.
The
movie poster for Hostel: Part II
(2007) seems to have been inspired by Washington Irving's short
story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Instead of a headless
horseman, though, the poster features the body of an apparently
decapitated nude woman, shown from neck to knees, holding what seems
to be her own head, the eyes of which are turned up, showing white,
and the tongue of which lolls between its parted lips.
Hostel: Part II
is nothing like the legend of the headless horseman, in either its
American version (Irving's version) or any of its medieval variants.
However, the apparent allusion to Irving's story (or, perhaps, more
generally, to the legend of the headless horseman per se)
may yet be intentional, a red herring, as it were, to imply a
reference that doesn't exist and a context irrelevant to the movie's
actual storyline. By suggesting parallels where there are none, the
advertisers of the film may have intentionally misled potential
viewers, the better to intrigue them while, at the same time,
preventing them from guessing the movie's plot.
The
Maniac (1980) movie
poster shows what, at first glance, seems to be a naked young woman
wearing a veil. She is beautiful of face and attractive in “all the
right places,” as the euphemistic phrase states.
However,
as one begins to look closer, it's clear that what seem to be the
straps of a transparent bra and the lines of sheer panties are
actually seams, and the blue-eyed blonde's staring, vacant gaze
suggests there's nothing human behind her stare. She is, in fact, a
mannequin—a mannequin that bleeds, for blood appears at her
hairline and streams down her brow and the side of her face. (I must
admit, I saw these details only after taking in other of the
mannequin's features.) The smooth contours of her body, like her
erect posture and her empty, glazed look make it clear she's a
mannequin, which makes her bleeding all the eerier.
The
movie's plot clears up the mystery of the bleeding mannequin, and the
explanation actually makes sense, in its own twisted way: the
“maniac” implied by the movie's title is a particular type of
madman,
a man with a fetish for agalmatophilia, like Pygmalion.
By
searching for erotic movie posters that don't depend on cliched
themes, such as Vampirism, lycanthropy, and witchcraft, one is apt to
find more unusual and creative possibilities for accounting for a
story's erotic character or, at the very least, as in Cadaver,
an innovative use of a rite theme.
But
there's another use to which such approaches can be put in a horror
novel (or film). A prologue or the opening scene of the story proper,
can describe such a situation as a movie poster such as the one's
we've considered, without presenting the explanation for its bizarre
nature (or with an implied explanation which turns out, for a
believable reason, to be false), thereby, like a movie poster or a
movie trailer, hooking readers with the mystery of the horror and
making them want to read on, even if it makes them buy the book. By
the same token, such an approach might hook an editor, making him or
her decide to commit to the purchase of the author's rights to his or
her story.