Horror Movies' Allusive Posters

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In promoting their horror films, several studios have relied upon posters which allude to other works of art. For example, a poster for The Descent is similar to the 1954 black-and-white photograph produced by surrealistic painter Salvador Dali and photographer Philippe Halsman in which several nude female models pose in such a way that, collectively, their bodies resemble a human skull. The result is In Voluptas Mors (Voluptuous Death).

The juxtaposition of beautiful nude women with an image of death (the skull they form) is striking in its contrast. More than nude men, nude women symbolize life, for it is they who conceive, bear, and deliver children, thus ensuring the survival of the human species. In having such vessels of life, so to speak, form an image of death, is Dali suggesting the ultimate futility of human life? Is he implying that beauty, sex, pregnancy, and birth are meaningless in the face of death? Alternatively, maybe he is indicating that, in the face (almost literally) of death, sex is humanity's only hope, tenuous as that hope may be.

It's informative, too, to think of what is missing from the photograph. The attributes of the models are intact—in them, as individuals. However, in the image of death that they form as a group, the skull is stripped of hair, of skin, and of a face. Gone are the eyes, the nose, the ears, and the lips. Gone, too, presumably, is the brain inside the cranium. What is left is bone and the negative spaces of the eye sockets and the places at which the other facial features once reposed. Stripped of the organs of sense—the eyes, ears, nose, lips, and skin—the skull is insensible, a mere thing, its objectivity total. Humanity, as represented in the women who form the skull, is reduced to bone.

Were we to ask Dali which of these meanings In Voluptas Mors is intended, he would likely reply, “Yes,” meaning that all these possible interpretations are correct (and, no doubt, many others).

Surrealism is about opening—or reopening—the doors of perception, about increasing the possibilities of understanding, about offering the world to us, new and undiscovered. How, though, might The Descent's allusion to this iconic painting be intended?

If the cave into which the female spelunkers descend is regarded as the womb and their expedition into the underworld an exploration of femininity (gender) and womanhood (female sexuality), these explorers, for whom their excursion does not go well, form the bones of the skull; their bodies, although still flesh and blood, bear the stamps of humanity—heads, complete with facial features and organs of perception; hair; skin; limbs; breasts; genitals; and buttocks, as well as internal organs—they are yet, at the same time, parts of an image of death, and a death that has occurred long enough ago to have reduced the remains to bone.

Paradoxically, they are literally alive, but figuratively dead, like the LIFE-IN-DEATH figure that haunts Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Although the filmmakers (or poster-makers) may not have had this allusion consciously in mind, the live female nudes whose bodies compose the skull on the poster that pro,motes the film appear to have the same sort of symbolic value as Coleridge's Death-in-Life. In Voluptas Mors also appears in a movie poster promoting The Silence of the Lambs. Its use of the photograph, which appears on the back of the head of the Death's-head Hawkmoth that covers Clarisse Starling's (Jodie Foster's) mouth, is assigned a fairly prosaic significance, according to “some,” who interpret the image to refer to nothing more than the seven “victims in the movie.” Something similar may be true, at the most basic level, of the women-as-skull poster that promotes The Descent. The female spelunkers may be represented symbolically by the models on the film's poster.

What, then, do I think The Descent's allusion to In Voluptas Mors represents? I have provided some clues in this post, and I provide others in my previous post concerning The Descent. In the final analysis, though, what matters is what the individual him- or herself who is confronted with such allusions makes of them, for, often, one's interpretations of a work of art, literary or otherwise, is equally (or more) about him- or herself as it is about the work of art. Dali would probably agree with this statement, as he would with most other takes on his art. Concerning The Descent, the poster probably creates as many possible meanings as there are interpreters, which may be a good thing.

Dali would likely think so.

In the next few posts, I'll consider a few more horror movies' allusive posters. In doing so, my commentaries will be a bit more explicit—most of the time.