THE RING: Poster Deconstruction

• Firstly, the thing that mostly stands out in this film poster for me is the close up of the girl and the facial expression made by the child actress: the scorn. This makes the film poster even more striking and harrowing and it looks almost abnormal that a child would pull such a sinister looking face, heightening the fear and achieving its goal of being chilling within its horror genre.
• The poster also conforms to a certain trend found in horror films of using a child as the main focus and as the protagonist such as The Exorcist or Insidious. This is seen as a scare factor as it looks as though something as innocent and oblivious as a child is tainted by the supernatural: it makes just about everything known to us look vulnerable.
• In this close up we can clearly see that the girl has cuts and deathly bluish white skin on her face and this again makes the whole poster seem even more evil looking. Also by having the hair over her eye like that, jet black in colour, it really stands out against the blue colour format of the poster and the one eye looks as though it is staring directly at the audience making it more personal and intimidating.
• The blue colour format of the poster subverts the stereotype for horror when the usual colours used are gothic colours such as red, black and white. The blue colour gives a cold feeling, emotionless and it could represent the surreality of television and how superficial and cold it is but it provokes all sorts of emotions and makes all kinds of impacts.  To add to the fact that it is going for the cold televised look, at the top of the poster there are faint lines and they just about smudge on the title just like a static television would d, connoting that television will be part of the main basis of the film.
• The block capitals used to make up the title make it simplistic whilst still making an impact, again making it look “perfect” as though things seem like that on television but almost too “perfect” which could make it look more harrowing.
• The trees in the background seem as though there is a black gaping hole in them and again this could suggest tainting something innocent and natural.
• The light cutting through the ‘g’ of ‘The Ring’ looks as though a television is being turned on, again conforming to the main topic of the film which is television.
• The poster abides by the golden rule as the main focus of the poster itself, the close up of the girl is within the triangle and looks the most effective.

POSTED BY SHAHNAZ