Best Horror Movie Logos
There’s no better way to spend a Friday night than to watch a classic horror movie. So, to get you in the mood, I thought I’d take a look at some of my favourite horror movie logos from cinema history.
If some don’t appear quite as you recollect, then don’t be too surprised. In the old days, studios took a much looser approach to their branding, with multiple, often prodigiously different logo designs popping up on different movie posters, video and DVD covers, as the sequences of the films themselves… not to mention variants of each of these in different national markets.
This is simply a matter of personal choice of logos for which I have true love.
The Exorcist
The 1973 classic film about a girl possessed by a demon was so frightening it that it provoked fainting and vomiting in movie theatres. Created by Dan Perri as part of the film’s title sequence, this logo draws on the story ’s religious themes in a subtly elegant manner.
In contrast with the crazed, cartoonish titles of the 1950s and 1960s horror flicks, Perri’s design instead employed the kind of formal semi-serifs you might expect on a Catholic bible and was all more sinister for it.
The Shining
Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel is considered one of the greatest horror movies of all time. So, therefore it’s fitting that its logo was created by one of the film world’s greatest graphic designers, Saul Bass.
Focussed around the outline of a mysterious evil presence in the opening ‘T’, the unbalanced typography reflects the turmoil in the mind of Jack Nicholson’s central character beautifully.
Friday the 13th
One of the most successful franchises in history, which produced 12 films and censuses, began Friday the 13th with a horror of 1980 over a group of teenagers who Ire successively killed in a camp. This film was meant to scare the audience as Ill as make them laugh, and this cartoon logo brilliantly mixes the macabre with the funny.
Mostly with lettering resembling broken pieces of wood the blood-drenched ‘13’ leaves little to the imagination about what’s in store (bucketloads of gore for those who appreciate a sick sense of humour ).
A Nightmare on Elm Street
The story of a phantom who haunts both people’s dreams and their waking hours, Nightmare on Elm Street was the archetypal 1980s horror and became a hugely successful franchise.
There used to be a range of logos across different promotional materials, but our favourite has to be this design, created by Dan Perri for the film’s opening titles. This skillfully constructed script subtly resembles a street of burning buildings and conveys a grim atmosphere of hellfire and damnation; indeed the stuff of nightmares.
Scream
Reinventing the slasher film by subverting its cliches(the characters are all expressly aware of horror tropes, which drives the plot), 1997’s Scream brought the horror genre kicking and, screaming into the modern age.
This super — clean, minimalist logo from the movie ’s poster added a splash of contemporary cool for the 90s audience–and who doesn’t love the cheeky stabbing motif in the final letter?
The Blair Witch Project
1999’s Blair Witch Project brought us a brand new movie genre: the found — footage horror. It really was a brand new approach for film marketing. Rather than appearing mostly on posters, the logo, along with other visual elements of the film, was initially distributed as a true story on the internet.
One of the earliest, and most successful, cases of what ’s become known as viral marketing, this creepy logo with its jagged, fractured lettering and haunting‘ stick man’ emblem, still stands up today as a design classic. The version shown above is from the DVD cover.
Paranormal Activity
With Blair witch‘s found footage concept and a blockbuster budget, Paranormal Activity has become one of the greatest horror franchises of the new century.
This understatement logo, based on the coldest minimal all- caps typography, is reminiscent of the digital technology behind the film material found, while the blurred lines, the wide core and the red- on- black colouring convey the horror it contains.
Let me know your thoughts on these cult classic films and some of their logo designs.
