The New Horror Movie Poster Aesthetics Reflect Our All-Too-Real Modern Day Dystopias
As on-screen horrors shift towards the societal and interpersonal, poster design has followed by depicting a more subtle unease
By Rachel Hawley
The poster for Ari Aster’s second feature film, the horror movie Midsommar, seems noticeably jarring for its genre. In the movie itself, the rolling hills and clear blue skies of the Swedish countryside take center stage; along with beautiful bouquets of flowers and the lemon yellow of a mysterious, pyramid-shaped temple at the edge of the titular festival’s grounds.
There’s also quite a bit of gore in Midsommar — the film is replete with smashed-in skulls, blood, guts, skinned faces, and corpses — but you wouldn’t know it from that poster design. The simple, elegant design frames half of star Florence Pugh’s face in warm, saturated tones, drawing out the yellow flowers in her hair against the bright, marine-blue background. The design checks none of the boxes for horror movie posters’ time-tested visual language: there’s no black and white or monochromatic color scheme, no blood-red accents, spooky buildings draped in fog, or silhouettes of barren trees. At first glance, you might not even notice the single tear rolling down…
