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.