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They’re what I call “knife posters” — movie posters which employ the same basic design solution and are, perhaps not surprisingly, all of the “mystery/thriller” genre. Once you know what to look for these posters are horribly easy to spot.
I’m not necessarily faulting any of these posters, nor saying any of them are bad. But again, sometimes I am. Mostly I’m pointing out that when an idea works once, that’s great. Cue the applause. But using it over and over will only get you diminishing return of that applause. It doesn't benefit a film that might deserve better representation, or a public who gradually lose their ability to differentiate one movie from another.
Really, if you’re a studio designer who’s being paid to be creative you should be able to come up something just the slightest bit original... don't you think? And that doesn’t mean just changing the color of the knife.
We begin with the poster for this howler starring the Queen of the C-Movies, Ashley Judd. The sailboat on which her husband supposedly died has a mirror-image knife blade as its reflection. That image isn’t too bad, but the half-faces don’t really work for me. They look like they're asking, “Are the reviews okay? Can we come out now?”
Smirking as if she’d just love to cop Ashley’s crown (and judging by Abandon’s reviews, she could), Katie Holmes looms over a layout clearly influenced by Jeopardy's, right down to the duotone treatment of the men’s faces and title type treatment. Problem is, it’s all cramped and off-balance, which happens when you shoe-horn elements into a layout they don’t fit.
Ashley must have it written into her contracts that this basic treatment be used as the launching pad for all her films’ posters (though the 1-sheet for Twisted, while very similar, isn’t strictly a knife/rip effect). That spooky face reminds of Scream, does it not? Morgan Freeman seems to say, “Ashley, what did you get me into?”, while Ashley's thinking, “Um... Well, the book sold well.”
John Travolta has usurped Katie’s position atop this 1-sheet whose knife is almost a carbon copy of the Jeopardy sailboat. As on the Abandon poster, the star’s face is full-color while the little supporting players warrant only a duotone... and judging by the size relevance, no one is more important than John; second-billed Vince Vaughn is banished to the silhouette in the knife.
Sean Young’s ver-r-ry deep cleavage serves as the “knife” image for this 1991 poster. It’s a good design, really, one that uses all that inky blackness and pale skin to create a mood that is both sensual and menacing. Apparently someone at Miramax felt the same way, because...
...one year later, Neil Jordan's idiosyncratic thriller came dangerously close to copying A Kiss Before Dying’s design. Here, Miranda Richardson’s cleavage substitutes for Sean Young’s, and Miranda is holding a gun instead of Matt Dillon. I suppose it’s up to personal opinion which one is more smokin’.
My friend John March designed the logo for this film, but had moved on to another agency before the poster was completed. [Fun factoid: "Fatal" was written on a napkin to achieve the ink-blotchy effect.] The red rip down the center is kind of a hybrid of the knife and the paper-rip. I think it works here, but visually the poster doesn’t tell you much. I doubt many people could describe it from memory, but really, this movie sold itself.
Another knife/rip hybrid, but it works because, for once, the jagged visual actually references the film title. And look, it’s Glenn again! I like this poster for its strange use of color and also for the huge areas of white space. Studio designers — and, sadly, my current employer — abhor a vacuum and usually cram lots of meaningless crap into it. Here, Columbia knew when to leave it alone.
You can tell Theresa Russell plays a lawyer because... well, you just can. Can’t you? This poster is guilty of uninspired design and needless imitation. “From the producer of Jagged Edge,” indeed. Someone hoped that placing the rip under the Jagged Edge reference might create a positive association. But if someone already saw Jagged Edge, why would they want to see a cheap imitation? You know what? No one did.
Cradle’s poster seems to have an attitude that, design-wise, it just doesn’t want to work (and really, that’s a bitch of a long title to work with). The whole thing might not work but for one little design decision — leeching the color from everything except an intense Rebecca deMornay peeking through the rip. That blast of warm color, broken only by the cold blue of her eye, makes her gaze twice as menacing.
If you know of any other knife/rip posters that should be added to this list, fire off an e-mail. Okay, class dismissed.
Knife to see you