Textual analysis of movie poster (Gabrielle)

The main image of this poster is the main focus, it uses a mixture of high-key and low-key lighting. This variation in lighting is used to give the effect of two different rooms, one of which is in front of the doors and the other is behind the doors.

The denotations of this poster are that it is of a group of people – most of who appear to be zombies with only one man appearing ‘normal’. As we, the audience can clearly see zombies have been used in the poster this leads us to believe that it is probably a horror movie from the zombie subgenre. The man holding the bouquet of flowers has a higher key of lighting on him than everyone else is the poster which tells the audience that he is most likely a main character within the film. As the title of the film is ‘Shaun of the Dead’ it is clear that he is most likely to be ‘Shaun’.

Shaun’s NVC (in this case his facial expression) portrays him as rather confused and puzzled as though he is unaware of what exactly is going on and why everyone else appears to be a mindless zombies. The anchorage at the top of the poster reads “Ever felt like you were surrounded by zombies?” – hand in hand with the main image this becomes some sort of pun, as Shaun is in fact surrounded by zombies.

From what can be seen of the character’s costumes, it looks as though they were all normal everyday people from different walks of life before being turned into zombies which makes me believe that it is most probably is down to some sort of epidemic.

The tagline written under the title of the film reads “A romantic comedy. With zombies” this tells the target audience that not only is the film a zombie horror movie but a romantic zombie comedy, this is supported by the website link posted at the bottom of the poster which reads ‘www.romzom.com’.

This poster follows the main convention that most film marketing projects do which is to follow a theme, e.g. the picture features zombies, the anchorage talks about zombies and the date of when the film will be released into cinemas makes a zombie like reference

Another popular convention that this poster follows is the use of a colour scheme - red, white and black. These three colours in particular are now commonly associated with horror films, as if you saw the use of red, white and black to market a film i.e on a poster you will most probably associate this film with the horror genre which is down to connotation that these colours hold, red in particular.

One convention which is challenged with layout of this poster is the idea of ‘the final girl’ as Shaun is clearly represented as the main character whereas, in the vast majority of horror films, the main character would be a young woman.

A wide-angle shot is used to fit as many characters as possible into the picture which gives the audience a better view of the setting for the film and allows the audience to differentiate between Shaun from the ‘zombies’ showing some sort of contrast. 


Written by: Gabrielle