3rd Poster Analysis- The Conjuring

This horror film poster is very creepy and gets your mind thinking about what is happening in the scene and what will happen in the movie itself. The word ‘Conjuring’ means the performance of tricks which are seemingly magical. For those with knowledge of what the word means, they will know to expect trickery in this film and will expect to see the typical horror film stunts such as doors mysteriously shutting by themselves, they will expect jump scares and ghost-like events. You are led to the assumption that the paranormal world will play a part in this film and there will be spirits or souls haunting the characters.

At the top of the poster is the text ‘From the director of Saw and Insidious’ which tells the viewer that this film will have similarities to the others by the same director. This proves the importance of “Auteur Theory” based on the concepts that ‘Andre Bazin’ came up with. For horror aficionados who have seen both highly successful horror films from the same director, they will know roughly how this director works and what to expect in their films.

Underneath this is the logo for the film itself, and it uses an ancient looking font which suggests that the storyline of this movie will refer back to past situations, which is then backed up by the sentence ‘based on the true case files of the Warrens’. This implies that the story is in fact true, which makes the experience of watching the movie much more powerful because these events genuinely happened to a family in the past. It also tells us that the film will be set in the past, and so this also adds to the overall terrifying experience of watching the film. ‘Based on a true story’ is one of the most iconic sentences used for advertising horror films because it forces the audience to accept seemingly unreal events as real, changing our perceptions of “normality”.

In the foreground of the actual image we can see a spooky looking tree with no leaves which is typically used in horror films to make the nature seem dead. The tree leans over the house in the background which clearly tells us that the tree is more important than the house in terms of what happened to the family and why it happened, but we are also given a preview of something that could be a main factor in the film. Tied to the tree is a noose which implies a suicide has taken place or is about to take place. Even though the noose is empty, on the ground is a shadow that looks like a dress with bare legs hanging out. This implies that the noose was used, and this cements the earlier implication that the paranormal world will play a big part in the film.

The house in the background informs us of the setting used in this film. It is a typical country house which obviously means this house is far away from civilisation which is massively typical for a horror film, and means that the family who occupy this house will be secluded from reality and will have to deal with the paranormal problems alone. The overall mood of the poster is quite chilling and we can quite clearly see that pathetic fallacy is being used a lot to show that a storm is coming and that the lives of this family are about to take a dramatic turn for the worse.