Well Played, Poster: I Saw the Devil

Longtime readers of Stale Popcorn will know that there's nothing I like more than a good horror movie poster. I consider Halloween to be the best movie poster of all time (with Rosemary's Baby right behind it in the rankings), but I so frequently find they disappoint with uninspired imagery and a distinct lack of design/purpose/personality/etc. The recent onslaught of "grindhouse" inspired posters has been a momentary boon to horror designers, since the use of faded colours, scrappy edges, divisional fold marks and hand-drawn/artistic concepts have added life to a genre that was more or less reproducing the same idea over and over again.


It's nice then to spot a horror movie poster that has gone off on its own direction, away from the hip, very in grindhouse aesthetic as well as away from the traditional ho-hum designs. Such is the case with this poster for I Saw the Devil. It looks clean and polished, while also utilising the "empty space" look the way it should be done. There's something to be said for a poster that doesn't give everything away and that's exactly what this poster does, and does it in an organic way. Love the way the car headlights are used to illuminate just enough to get our tongues figuratively wagging. The blood in the snow, the mysterious shadowed man holding a hammer and the tagline that makes me wonder "Lives inside what? The man? The world? THE CAR? Oh gawd, does evil live inside the yellow van?!?"