Horror Film Poster Analysis 2

The Oblong Box (1969)

Director: Gordon Hessler

Country: Britain

Genre: Generic Horror

Where The Oblong Box isn’t one of the world’s best known horrors, it was symbolic of the fact that it introduced to the film world the power duo that was Vincent Price and Christopher Lee. They went on to star in a lot more British horror films, and The Oblong Box kick started their co-star career. This film is also very symbolic of its main theme: “imperial exploitation of native peoples in Africa”. The film was seen as “pro-black” and this caused it to be banned in Texas.

The tagline on the poster (quite long by today’s standards) promises a “tale of the living dead”, which the reader could assume is about zombies. However, the film isn’t about zombies, and isn’t really about the living dead, rather a man faking his own death and then appearing to come back to life. This was quite clever of the designers of the poster, because just a year before the release of The Oblong Box, Night of the Living Dead was brought to cinemas, so a lot of people were getting into the new zombie craze. Fans of NLD would see this poster and assume more of the same, and would want to see it.

The poster itself is quite simple. Only three colours are used. The green could be thought of as representing decay, as a dead body would, but it could just be there to represent the fact that the film is in colour. The poster would make sense without the green as the main focus is the image and not what colours are used. Its simplicity and gothic style are evocative of the fact that this is a literary interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Oblong Box. The image appears hand drawn and is in black and white, much like illustrations in old novels, and Poe is famous for his gothic/horror stories and poems such as The Raven. Of course, black and white are colours which frequently appear on horror movie posters, the black representing the evil and darkness, and the white (as a complete opposite contrast) usually highlighting key parts of the poster, such as the characters’ faces or icons associated with that particular series. There are of course exceptions (Dead Silence for example). Here the black is the colour of the earth, representing the fact that the evil is coming from the ground (the man coming back to life). This is true, as in the film, after coming back from the dead; the man becomes the villain and hunts down various people, so in a sense the evil has come from the earth.

What is interesting about the image is that it arguably doesn’t fit with the story. The man in the coffin on the poster is clearly dead, whereas in the film the man never dies (if he looks as if he is decaying that is purely because of the burns he received early in the film). Also at the bottom of the poster there is some sort of underground cavern with bodies hanging from the ceiling. This might be a reference to the fact that the man murders a few people in the film, but he doesn’t have a cave, or any sort of chamber to keep his victims in. Again, these aspects could be extended from the fact that they could be trying to bring in a similar audience of people who watched and enjoyed NLD.