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| Credit: Pixabay |
I’m admitting it straight out: I hate John Carpenter’s “The Thing”. I always have. This remake of the 1950s original, which bears the slightly different title of “The Thing From Another World”, is based on John Campbell Jr.’s sci fi horror novella, “Who Goes There?”. Carpenter’s movie came across to me as more gore exploitation than anything. Regardless of that, I liked the movie’s promo poster.
I first saw this poster in the summer of 1982, when the movie released. I was 11-going-on-12 and with my parents and younger brother travelling around the Los Angeles area (we had just moved to Fresno). The poster depicted a monstrous, shadowed out, humanoid figure, beams of cold white light seeming to radiate from the center of its face, set against a dark arctic background. This poster was all over Los Angeles: on the benches of the bus stops, on the freeway billboards, and definitely on buildings throughout its place of production, Universal Studios (which my brother and I had visited for the first time). I was fascinated with the poster.
Yet I didn’t dare ask my parents to take me to see the movie. This wasn’t only because I knew they wouldn’t but because my little pre-teen mind knew seeing it would give me nightmares for life. But that poster alone made me wonder what kind of monster was in the movie and made me guess that it was a monster that was pretty horrible. That’s why I was kind of upset when an article at ScreenRant earlier this week revealed what the shadowy figure was supposed to be or more like who it was supposed to be. In case you’re like me and you prefer the mystery in art, I will only say that the article revealed it to be one of the human characters in the film.
Reactions like mine say how great of a job artist Drew Struzan did making the poster even though, according to the ScreenRant article, he did so in a rush of 24 hours. When an artist of any type--whether a promo artist for movies, a book illustrator, or a fine artist (gallery artist)--puts mystery into their work by holding back certain details such as features in the subject matter’s face, it makes the observer question the event being depicted. It also makes them come up with possible answers to those questions.
In the case of horror art the question often is something like “What’s going to happen?” And the speculated answer often is, “Probably something horrible.” If it’s an illustration on the cover of a book or on a movie poster, it’s most likely to do one of two things: 1) make the observer want to find out how horrifying the story will be, or 2) repel her from purchasing the book or an admission ticket because she’s too scared to find out how horrifying it will be. The latter is mostly the case with non-horror fans.
The promo poster for Carpenter’s “Thing” (among other, uh, things) also made me want to be a writer of horror. It made me want to write about the mysteries of the dark side of life, that side full of forces and events that are often forbidden to be seen or engaged with in real life and so makes us ask “Who (or what) goes there?” So, like great horror art such as with Struzan’s poster, great horror fiction does the same. When certain details are left out of a horror story, especially at the end, it makes the reader ask “What happened?” or “What’s going to happen?” And it makes him answer his question speculatively with something such as “The monster will probably devour the world.” It leaves that question and possible answer on the reader’s mind for a long time making him glad the situation isn’t occurring in the real world and probably never will.
So, even though I could never stand John Carpenter’s movie, “The Thing”, the art of the promo poster alone did a lot for me. It made me ask questions about the terrifying situation it depicts. It made me speculate answers to those questions. And, as a writer of horror, it’s made me ask similar questions so readers can hopefully ask those kinds of questions like “What goes there?”
Do you think less details in horror storytelling can make the reader think more about the story?
Until next time . . .
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| Credit: Wikimedia Commons/RKO Radio Pictures |
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